The Jlelodg of llife 





Class _ _ 



Book._ 

Copyiightli 



COPYRIGHT DEPOSIT. 



The Melody of Life. 

A 

presentation of Spiritual Grutb 

THROUGH 

Musical Symbolism. 

BY 

SUSIE C. CLARK, 

AUTHOR OF " A LOOK UPWARD," " PILATE'S QUERY," 
" TO BEAR WITNESS," " LORITA," ETC. 



Music, with her silver sound, 

With speedy help doth lend redress." 

— Shakespeare. 



NEW YORK: 

THE ALLIANCE PUBLISHING COMPANY. 

1902. 



-fi\|AS vS 



VhTT-IBRARY OF 

CONGRESS, 
T'*o Comes Recbvco 

AUG. 16 1902 

E3HT ENTRY 
14-- /f ^ 
t^XXa. No. 

COPY B. 



Copyright, 



C. CLARK 



All rights reserved 









To 

cMy dear cMother, 

whose 

patience, fidelity, and devotion 

have so enriched the harmony 

of 
Life's song* 



The Melody of Life 

I rv 

rive Cantos 

I. The Staff Spirit 

II. The Key ..... Love 

III. The Score .... Life 

IV. The Rhythm . • ■ Action 

V. The Melody .... Progression 



The Staff ....... Spirit 



" Music is the harmonious voice of creation, an echo 
of the invisible world, one note of the divine concord 
which the entire universe is destined one day to sound." 

Mazzini. 



" From Music's centre, Love first springs, and reaches 
outward by its tendrils tightly drawn, to clasp the 
universe and all contained therein. Men shall in time 
this lesson learn, that all of life is sweeter, fairer, more 
divinely grand because Music is — the Soul and Saviour 
even of all." 



" The unbounded universe is one sleepless lyre, whose 

chords of love, of hope, of purity and peace are fanned 

into a dreamy and mystic melody by the breath of the 

invisible God." 

Anon. 



The Melody of Life. 

Music, as it is accepted, produced and 
loved on earth is not that full-toned harmony 
which is Life itself, which can only be sensed 
by the quickened ears of the spirit, when 
ensphered by those mighty vibrations pulsing 
through the vast ether, from the wondrous 
Harp of the Universe. Yet without Music's 
grand diapason, broken into tuneful fragments 
and shed broadcast on earth, mortal life would 
be an empty thing, since it is the beauty of 
Life and Love made audible. The Soul of 
Music pervades and inspires all life, and from 
the wide domain of Nature rings its sweet 
essence everywhere, its ceaseless Te Deum. 

This entire visible world which we call the 
universe, although a mere fraction only of the 
vast infiniverse — that sum total of all the 
universes, whose conception transcends the 
capacity of the finite mind — is a harp of 



myriad strings, each one pulsating to the tone 
struck by the Master Hand — the Creative 
Maestro — all blending together in modulated 
harmony, a symphony of musical vibrations. 
Schopenhaur says that "were we able to give 
a thoroughly satisfactory theory of Music, we 
could give a thoroughly satisfactory theory of 
the world," which shows that he had caught 
the truth of vibration as the basis of all 
creation, all light, sound, thought and life. 
One can readily believe that " e'en the planets 
as they roll emit a melody divine," and that 
ears terrestrial have been purified from 
earthly dust sufficiently to catch the majestic 
strain, voicing its anthem of praise to the 
Infinite Unknowable Source of all Life. 

Pythagoras was the first to suggest the 
idea of the Music of the Spheres, later ex- 
pressed by Shakespeare in "The Merchant 
of Venice : " 

" There s not the smallest orb which thou beholdest 
But in his motion like an angel sings, 
Still quiring to the young-eyed cherubim. " 



Plato wrote that " a siren sits on each planet, 
who carols a most sweet song, agreeing to the 
motion of her own particular planet, but har- 
monizing with the other seven" ; and according 
to Maximus Tyrius "the mere proper motion 
of the planets must create sounds, and as the 
planets move at regular intervals, those sounds 
must harmonize. " 

The Rosicrucian's theory of Music is that 
" the whole world is a musical instrument, life 
a chromatic and diatonic scale of musical 
tones. The axis, or pole of the celestial 
world, is intersected by the spiritual sun, or 
centre of sentient being and from thence stream 
forth rays of light, which divided, form color, 
which by motion, give off tones of music, fill- 
ing the universe with celestial sound. Every 
man has a spark, or microscopic sun in his 
own being and thus diffuses rays of light and 
tones, broken, it is true, by the incoherencies 
of matter, but still in essence, musical tones. 
Earthly music is the faintest tradition of the 
angelic state. It remains in the mind of man 



as the dream of a lost paradise. Music is yet 
master of man's emotions and therefore of 
man. Heavenly music is produced from 
impact upon the paths of the planets, which 
stand as chords, or strings to the rays of the 
sun, hence light and heat travelling between 
solar centres and circumferences waken tone- 
chords, the sum of which is etherial music. 
Thus is earthly music, a relic, a dream, a 
memory of heaven, an efflux from the motion 
of planetary bodies, a celestial speech whose 
dim echoes are heard and imitated on earth, 
and thus are light and love, are colors and 
music, inextricably combined by one produc- 
ing cause." 

It is true that all life in the macrocosm, or 
microcosm, is made up of a series of vibra- 
tions, moderate or rapid, making thus a pitch 
of high or low degree. And when we im- 
mortals do not keep to the right pitch, discord 
naturally ensues, health wanes, and fair, 
beauteous life becomes only a clay-bound ex- 
istence, unillumined by the light of the Spirit. 



Thence to express a perfectly healthy, active 
life we must become attuned and remain in 
harmonious rapport with the universe, must 
find our true pitch, our centre, and then attune 
that tonic chord to the eternal rhythm at the 
heart of nature, which always breathes in uni- 
son with the Creative Source of all harmony. 
For Omnipotence in all its mighty works, 
is delicacy itself. That wonderful Force, 
over-ruling, underlying all creative expres- 
sion, keeps Itself in time and tune. Its sway 
pulsates in alternate action and re-action, like 
the systole and diastole of the human heart. 
Tides ebb and flood, noonday follows the 
darkness of midnight, planets reach their peri- 
helion and pass to the utmost limit of their 
solar tether, gigantic pendulums marking the 
epochs of evolution. Such rhythmical action 
everywhere obtains, that to catch its measure 
and pulsate with it, makes all action easy 
and devoid of weariness, as is the motion 
of the dancer's feet when music beats the 
time. Fatigue is forever past when that 



life which men call life but which is mere 
existence, becomes one with the Rhythmic 
Breath, when its harmonious expression 
becomes our unbroken habit. " God breathed 
into man the breath of life and he became 
a living soul," that breath which was a 
vibration of a certain pitch and amplitude, 
to become one of the strings of His mam- 
moth harp. 

The natural world about us is something 
more than a stage where all the men and 
women are mere players, it is far more than a 
picturesque theatre of action. It is a part of 
us, we are one with it, its life is our life; it is 
only a slower vibration, a gradation of tone in 
the vast symphony of which we are tones, 
when we are not, alas, merely semi-tones. 
This inter-relation of each atom in the universe 
to every other atom, even the vitalized atoms in 
man, explains the necessity, proves the verity 
of that imperfectly understood science of 
Astrology. Planets strike the key for human 
action, if mortals could accord and co-operate 






*3 

therewith. No fatalism is thus imposed, for 
the spirit of man, even when embodied, is 
one with the Power that spoke all worlds and 
souls into being. Its possibilities are limitless. 
On the earliest page of Creation's wonder- 
ful score, while preparing a theatre for His 
musicians, His vitalized tones, the Great 
Composer uttered that wondrous word : " Let 
there be Light," quickening into action another 
range of vibrations of almost inconceivable 
velocity. For, while a sound of lowest, 
faintest quality can be heard by thirty-two air 
pulsations a second (all sounds being included 
between that low rate and 7,000 vibrations 
a second), the slowest rate of vibration at 
which the first color is visible is 39,000 a 
second, and a violet hue requires a sensation 
upon the eye of 61,000, its velocity being 900 
trillions a second ; the sense of smell, which 
is mere perception, ranges still higher, while 
beyond are the rays of odyllic and astral light 
caught by the super-sensitive vision. What 
are the vibrations accomplishing that lie 



14 

between those of sound and sight? Are they 
expended on the sense of touch, on mental 
and psychical lines, or thought waves? This 
is one of the mysteries reserved for our next 
College course in Life's school. And by then 
we may have grown to hear the message the 
flowers bear to us, to discern the entrancing 
melody flashed forth by the radiant hues of 
sunset. For while its rosy or golden brilliancy 
is seen by the natural eye, its musical rhythm 
will be caught by the spiritually unfolded ear, 
even as the eye of the spirit might also grow 
to detect the colors of musical tones sensed by 
the natural ear — the golden shimmer of the 
nightingale's trill, the deep green of the 
soughing pine. We say "I see — I hear"; we 
but catch the rhythm of certain vibrations, we 
discern motion of varying degrees of rapidity. 
As an occult writer has expressed it, " Motion 
is the ever-weaving shuttle of Omnipotence, 
bringing to light the thought of Infinite Mind." 
As our perceptions become refined beyond 
the plane of sensation, we readily detect the 



vibration of a thought, and decide if it be 
keyed in divine rhythm sufficienlty to har- 
monize with our own pitch, even as now we 
clearly sense when a discordant tone is struck 
by an angry word, which is always unrelated 
to God's universe. That which seems light 
to the natural man is darkness to one of 
spiritual discernment. How illusive will 
matter appear when our spiritual eyes are 
opened. Spirit and Soul are Light itself, 
yet how few perceive them. 

But Light, blessed Light, was the first god- 
mother of all life. For what is the Source — 
God — as we term it ? Is it not the Central 
Sun, the cosmic, radiating, emanating Glory, 
we know no more? As our solar sun is the 
source of all physical life and vegetation, so 
the flame that enkindles every spirit, the 
illumining power of every soul, is the Infinite 
Sun, the Eternal Energy, in which the 
warmth of love, the tire of intellect, and of 
all other attributes are ensphered. God is 
Spirit (not a Spirit), God is Light. How sadly 



the misconception of God, and the misunder- 
standing of man's true relation to God and to 
his fellow man, have proven gigantic ob- 
stacles in the path of human progress toward 
the Light of Truth ! The light of the spirit 
at its point of union with divinity, how few 
perceive it ! Fewer still recognize Deity as 
an all-pervading Glory, eternally immanent 
within the soul. 

There is something very attractive and 
acceptable in the Zoroastrian religion, 
although Parseeism has been debased in 
recent times from its original pure ideal, both 
by the Guebres, or Fire worshipers, in the 
small barren tract of Persia, to which they 
were restricted after the Mohammedan inva- 
sion, and also by that branch which emi- 
grated to Hindustan and eventually imbibed 
Hindu customs and caste distinctions, grafting 
them onto their own faith. But the pure 
Zoroastrian conception, few modern disciples 
of Truth could gainsay. It recognizes one 
God, omnipotent, invisible, without form, the 



17 

creator, ruler, and preserver of the universe. 
He is called Ormuzd, and sprang from 
primeval Light, which Itself .emanated from 
a supreme, incomprehensible Essence, that 
cannot be named, called the Eternal. The 
sun is the eye of Ormuzd, and like all heav- 
enly bodies is animated with a soul. Comets, 
or stars with tails, are considered under the 
care of the greater luminaries, Sirius, the 
dog-star, having general control over the 
whole sidereal system. (Modern astronom- 
ical discoveries conceive, as we know, of 
Alcyone as central star.) Ormuzd, it was 
taught, created a number of good spirits to 
act as the medium of his bounty to man, 
and intrusted them each with the guardian- 
ship of a certain person, an animal, or 
inanimate object. (How inevitably are we 
confronted with some form of spiritualism 
in every religious faith, ancient or modern.) 
The spirits of the stars were held to exert 
a beneficent influence upon the affairs 
of men and to reveal the secrets of the 



future to those who understand their signs. 
Hence Astrology has always been a favoriie 
science with the Persians. The worship of 
idols, or of anything except Ormuzd, was 
held in abomination, but a reverence for the 
fire and the sun was inculcated, as they are 
the emblems of the glory of the Supreme 
Deity. 

But these worshipers did not ignore the 
shadow. To Ormuzd as the source of all 
good, is opposed Ahrinam, the cause of evil. 
To worship the good and hate the bad, are 
the two fundamental articles of the Parse-e 
creed. Prayer, obedience, industry, honesty, 
hospitality, alms-giving and chastity, with 
that rare Eastern virtue of truthfulness, are 
enjoined, while envy, hatred, quarreling, 
anger, revenge and polygamy are strictly for- 
bidden. Fasting and celibacy are con- 
sidered displeasing to Ormuzd. Sacred fire 
is kept continually burning in consecrated 
places and is fed with choice wood and 
spices. The Parsees never blow out a light 



because the breath is thought to pollute this 
emblem of Deity. 

To the aspiring soul, an ever-burning fire, 
or better still, the glorious orb of day, is the 
only acceptable symbol of the Un-nameable 
One, the Source. How much truer, more 
widely suggestive it is than the universally 
reverenced cross (relic of ancient phallic, or 
sex worship) and designed to portray or keep 
vital in the mind of man, the vicarious 
suffering and atonement of a man God, a 
divine sacrifice for mortal ignorance, before 
its growth was sufficiently ripened to become 
wise, and therefore able to renounce the evil 
and turn to the light, as it has not yet wholly 
done. 

But every man as well as the matchless 
Nazarene, is a manifestation of God in vary- 
ing degrees. Man is not God, even as 
Nature is not God, but he is a divine mani- 
festation. The one grand central sun of 
being — God — radiates His rays of life and 
love to all the systems of the universe and 



the life they bear. He is the law that rounds 
the dewdrop, shapes a world, and throbs 
with love in the human heart. 



From whirling suns out-speeding hurled 
Are atoms cast that form a world ; 
Sparks thrown frpm fiery chariot wheel : 
From tangent line, they pause and reel, 
Gain equipoise, obedience feel 
To Law supreme. 

From mighty centre of Deific Life, 
With floating, starry soul-germs rife, 
Comes forth a wavering, nascent spark, 
Down groping thro' crude matter dark, 
To find as innate choice shall mark 
Its destined form. 



Like world, like soul, each birth must be 
Controlled by Order's fixed decree ; 
With mountain or with mote, the same ; 
Law, Nature, God, how'er we name 
The First Great Cause, the Central Flame 
Whose sparks are we. 



The great philosopher, Plato, who was 
ever reasoning about the origin and destiny 
of the soul, and aspiring toward the Divine, 
taught the existence of one Supreme Being, 
without beginning, end, or change. He 
called it the Good, and compared it to the 
sun which, he said "not only makes objects 
visible but is the cause of their generation, 
nutriment, and increase. So the Good, 
through super-essential light, imparts being 
and the power of being known to everything, 
which is the object of knowledge." 

In other words, as the Light, which we 
cannot touch, or handle, is all-pervading, as 
Life, which is beyond definition, is omni- 
present, so is Spirit the breath, fire and force 
of all life, the all-pervading, abiding essence, 
in which is no darkness at all. The Light 
of Spirit is indeed the Staff on which our 
life melody must be written, the only founda- 
tion on which to build. Then should not the 
goal of all living and striving be the constant 
endeavor to come closer in touch with the 



Divine Spirit, to realize more fully the 
potency of Spirit, and our ability to grasp 
and wield the same, until the Light of the 
Eternal Sun shall shine in us and through 
us, and be shed abroad by our every act and 
word? 

How broad and universal this deep con- 
sciousness of Spirit makes him who has 
gained it ; how it unfolds his nature, enlarges 
his sympathies, deepens his interest in all 
life, brings him in close, intelligent touch 
with that vast, pictorial life which Nature 
holds, in its varied forms, which is a perpetual 
feast, an education, and a benediction, brings 
him in harmonious relation also with that 
larger life as expressed in humanity, and 
relates him consciously to that still more 
advanced, arisen life, in the spheres beyond. 
It is all one beutiful Life wherever expressed ; 
one all-pervading Breath, and we are one 
with it ; a strong, masterful part of the Infinite 
Life, a necessary factor in its purposes, a 
potent agency in the fulfillment of its plans. 



23 

Spirit being the only reality, the one life, 
it follows then there can come no separation 
between spirit and spirit under any circum- 
stances, clothed or unclothed with clay, bond 
or free. Once reaching the high vibrations 
of spiritual realization, there is indissoluble 
one-ness with all life, each soul must vibrate 
intelligently with any other soul to whom it 
is attuned, in unbroken communion and help- 
ful intercourse. To hold any other opinion, 
relegates the thinker to the dark ages of 
blind materialism. To question one's belief 
in spirit companionship and communion (a 
privilege which the Master enjoyed, and to 
which he lent the sanction of his example, 
both while wearing the fleshly form and after 
his release therefrom), is quite uncompli- 
mentary and discourteous. For it goes with- 
out saying that the intelligent person of to- 
day, one who has outgrown materialism, 
must of necessity be a Spiritualist in the 
truest, the best and highest sense of the word. 
There is but one life, the life of spirit, the 



24 

life of freedom, of illumination, but the ma- 
jority of mortals are not yet alive, and can- 
not comprehend in its beauty, fullness and 
wonderful power what Life is — the Life 
which is spirit. They cannot feel the attrac- 
tion of spirit, are content to pursue a merely 
mundane, material existence cf clay-bound 
consciousness. We do not assert "There is 
no matter," for matter is spirit at its slowest 
rate of vibration, spirit solidified, even as ice 
is a materialized form of water ; matter is 
necessary on this plane of expression for 
all human experience, is thus a factor in all 
spiritual growth and unfoldment, but victory 
over it is the goal, spiritual mastery the prize 
to seek, instead of idle enjoyment of the 
pleasures and appetites which the material 
realm affords. 

There are many excellent traits of human 
character whose possession and exercise are 
often ranked as spirituality of the highest 
type, until conceptions of what this grandest 
soul-attribute really is have become vague 



25 

and imperfect. If a person who is born of 
exemplary parents and is reared in a refined 
environment, shielded from every temptation, 
screened from the contact, or knowledge of 
vice, if such a one expresses a high ethical 
unfoldment, if an honorable morality char- 
acterizes his every act, he is pronounced by 
his partial friends, and usually by the world, 
as "so spiritual, you know," when it is fre- 
quently true that such untried, untested na- 
tures have never gained even a distant vision 
of their own spiritual possibilities, they have 
no plummet with which to gauge the depth 
of the Infinite Sea of Spirit. 

Quite frequently also a cultured intellect 
is mistaken for spirituality, and the masters 
of mental development are considered reli- 
able guides to the heights of the soul. But 
intellectual giants are often, perhaps usually, 
spiritual pigmies, and Truth must be spirit- 
ually discerned, can never be intellectually 
apprehended. An active intellect is a serious 
bar 10 the unfoldment and exercise of intui- 



26 

tion which is the most direct avenue to soul 
wisdom. For the mind is largely an external 
gate. Its chief office is to collect data, 
accumulate treasure from the sense plane. 
Intellect therefore becomes proud, rasping, 
selfish, which is fatal to all spiritual growth ; 
and to the brain which is wise in its own 
conceits, to that mind which is ossified by its 
own preconceived opinions, inspiration rarely 
comes. Except ye become as a little child, 
ye cannot enter the kingdom of spirituality. 
None would disparage the broadest, deepest 
intellectualculture, since an all-round knowl- 
edge of facts on the external and mental 
planes, the most advanced philosophical con- 
ceptions are most essential to the active soul, 
but like the possession of gold, so likewise 
an abundance of intellectual wealth breeds 
arrogance in its possessor. The intellect is 
always self-reliant, never God-reliant. It is 
the pure in heart who see God, who find 
the omnipotent Good. It is not the mentally 
keen who gain this primal beatitude, the 



27 

ineffable vision, that spiritual discernment to 
which the treasures of Truth are revealed. 
There are many sweet-souled invalids also 
who misconceive their prostration as a visita- 
tion of divine providence, the expression for 
them of the will of God, and therefore an 
experience to be submissively borne ; and 
such serene attitude under physical suffering 
is interpreted as the mark of great spiritu- 
ality ; it may perhaps prove the road that 
leads eventually' to spiritual heights. But 
the fact remains that no soul who has gained 
spiritual realization can be overtaken by 
illness. It is the pitiful lack of spirituality 
in this material world that accounts for the 
prevalence of disease. If perfect health 
exists in the soul, nothing else can be 
expressed in the body. But if fear and 
worry betoken a soul partially divorced from 
its Source, if lack of poise advertises the 
paucity of that perfect trust which divine 
union always supplies, then weakness and 
disorder must ensue. 



There is likewise a spiritual conciousness 
which is not spirituality, albeit this conscious- 
ness should also be the goal of every spirit 
while embodied, the ability to transcend the 
weight and sensation of the body, to walk as 
spirits should, hardly feeling the ground 
passed over, to annul the physical laws of 
fatigue, of contagion, of drafts, and many 
other features of mortal life, to know in a 
measure while wearing a body, what it really 
is to be a spirit, to be truly ' conscious on the 
spiritual plane now, something more than an 
inert clod of clay ; this is our privilege and 
prerogative, and the progressive spirit should 
press steadily on towards such attainment. 
But the ability to thus transcend material 
consciousness is however sometimes reached 
through the psychic plane, through the semi- 
trance, or the absorption of silence, by which 
there is temporary divorcement between the 
spirit and the body, even to the possibility of 
making long excursions into the spiritual 
realm, but on returning to the normal state, 



2 9 

little mastery has been gained to dominate 
physical weakness or bondage. 

Perhaps no other word can better express 
spirituality than that of mastery, which yields 
a selflessness whose possessor never dreams 
that he has it. There can be separate con- 
quests over various foibles and temptations ; 
there are triumphs over besetting habits 
which harden into sins, but all these and far 
more must be mastered, each mortal battle 
must be fought, each victory won, before the 
soul is monarch of its own realm, and spirit- 
uality is attained. 

There is an occult precept that only those 
who have gone out from God, returning, 
knew Him, that one can only thoroughly 
appreciate God who has ample knowledge of 
evil. It was only after the world had known 
its dark ages that it reached a renaissance, a 
period of new birth, of art, literature, or 
science. From the darkness, the ashes of 
materialism, a religion of spirit-ualism is 
born, an era of new thought : the reign of 



3° 

health after the wounds and diseases of the 
people are healed, the long bondage of 
physical infirmity ended. It is after the soul 
has known its dire eclipse, its midnight 
gloom, the dense shadow of outer darkness, 
that the call is heard: "arise, shine, for thy 
light is come," the voice of the divinity latent 
within, always waiting to be heard. The 
Light arises in the East — symbol of eternal 
youth — when the soul awakes to know itself, 
for the soul is ageless, knows naught of 
time. It ticks off its existences, or expres- 
sions, through clay, as with a second-hand on 
the clock of eternity. It accepts the limitation 
of matter only to triumph over it. And this 
is our stent in the present existence, at this 
very hour, to dominate the clay, to bring 
strength out of weakness, freedom from the 
bondage of the flesh, harmony out of mun- 
dane discords, to achieve victory over mortal 
defeats, and a glorious triumph over repeated 
failures. 

In every musical staff, the spaces between 



3i 

the lines are as valuable, important, as the 
lines themselves. A richly, rounded life 
must taste all experiences, must sound its full 
value in every position, must know every 
note of the scale, before it will need the 
ledger lines above the staff, to accommodate its 
lofty expression. Richter has said "Every 
note of Mozart's is a round in the ladder of 
the spheres, by which he ascended to the 
Heaven of perfection." Our realization of 
spirit forms our ladder and our staff. This is 
the Alpha and Omega, the do and si, through 
every octave in the scale of life. For Spirit 
is life, action, abounding energy, unflagging 
zeal ; it brings growth — aspiration — inspi- 
ration — at-one-ment. 

There are some ripened souls that shed a 
radiance that can be felt, the illumination 
consciously won cannot be wholly veiled by 
the eclipsing flesh. Did not the Master 
counsel " let your light shine before men that 
they may glorify your Father which is in 
Heaven." That light must stream from the 



32 

kingdom within, the true heaven where 
dwelleth the Father. For even the illumined 
soul shines with a reflected light, the light of 
the Eternal. 'For in them he hath set a tab- 
ernacle for the sun.'" The glory is not indi- 
vidual, but gained through the at-one-ment 
of the soul with the Over Soul, even as the 
perfected being symbolized by the Woman of 
the Apocalypse is clothed with the sun ; the 
moon ( representing all earthly conditions ) 
under her feet, while all planetary influences 
(which can only dominate the physical man) 
are worn upon the brow as a crown of 
conquest. 

Then be so pervaded with the light of the 
Spirit, so thrilled with the wondrous, inde- 
scribable consciousness of Spirit, that life 
really becomes a life in the spirit world now, 
even the weight of the body is annulled, the 
bondage of sensation is overcome, the old 
law of fatigue outgrown, for we come in 
touch with spiritual laws, with freedom, 
emancipation from pain and disease, which 



33 

should not afflict spirits such as we are, we 
gain a foretaste of what it really is to be a 
spirit. For puerile thoughts of the mundane 
plane are transcended by the vibrations of 
wisdom from Omniscience, with which we 
thus become attuned, and realization of Spirit 
dawns, of our true spiritual estate, all there is 
of us, naught else abides. Only then shall we 
live as spirits should, then shall we know and 
grasp all of spiritual truth, which our grow- 
ing capacity can hold, then all darkness, 
error and discord shall flee away, because 
"thy light has come." " Let there be light" 
— the light of the Infinite Sun — Absolute 
Spirit. 

Satellites we of a Central Sun, 

Evolved therefrom, revolving ever, 
Our life, its life, its light our flame, 

Our goal and constant endeavor. 
Our warmth its glow; our power and strength 

Shines in each ray that streams to bless 
And light our path, on the journey trod 

From error to truth and holiness. 



34 

Differing magnitudes, small and great, 

We human planets present to view; 
Different orbits we each may trace, 

While to law of allegiance true. 
Comets there are who dart to and fro 

In a way most erratic and odd; 
But e'en their course encircles the sun, 

Naught can satisfy the soul but God. 



O Light of Life, Source of all loving 

Evolver of each thought that burns 
And glows with beauty when raised t'ward Thee 

But darkens when from Thee it turns, 
Make us true as magnet to pole-star, 

As unswerving, unflinching, and pour 
On us Thy radiance and glory ; 

May we bask in Thy beams evermore. 



(I. 

The Key . Love 



V 



LIFE'S KEY. 



The hand that fashioned me tuned my ear 

To chord with the major key ; 
In the darkest moments of life I hear 
Strains of courage, and hope and cheer 

From choirs that I cannot see ; 
And the music of life seems so inspired 
That it will not let me grow sad or tired. 

Yet through and under the magic strain 
I hear, with the passing of years, 
The mournful minor's measures of pain, 
Of souls that struggle and toil in vain 

For a goal that never nears ; 
And the sorrowful cadence of good gone wrong 
Breaks more and more into earth's glad song. 

And oft, in the dark of the night, I wake 

And think of sorrowing lives ; 
And I long to comfort the hearts that ache, 
To sweeten the cup that is bitter to take, 

And to strengthen each soul that strives. 



33 

I long to cry to them: "Do not fear! 
Help is coming and aid is near." 



However desolate, weird, or strange 

Life's monody sounds to you, 
Before to-morrow the air may change, 
And the great Director of music arrange 

A programme perfectly new ; 
And the dirge in minor may suddenly be 
Turned into a jubilant song of glee. 



Ella Wheeler Wileox. 



The master of musical harmony who would 
weave his grand tone-thoughts into melody, 
must first, of course, have his staff on which 
to inscribe the same, and then he must select 
the key in which his full anthem, or sym- 
phony shall find expression. Likewise man, 
in transcribing his anthem of life, from his 
grand foundation of spirit, the staff of exist- 
ence, as of life, must work out his own indi- 
vidual type of harmony (or perhaps of dis- 
cord), must find and strike clear and true the 
key-note of his character. 

But we also have a physical key-note. It 
is indeed true that organically we each have 
our own tone. And an advanced disciple of 
truth, one of occult powers, can readily ascer- 
tain by sweeping the strings of an autoharp, 
or striking the chords of a piano, to what 
musical key each personal presence is at- 
tuned, because not until the right key is 



4° 

struck is the astral light made clear enough 
for him to read clairvoyantly the aura indi- 
cating his sitter's life and aspects, which 
flashes upon him when the vibrations stirred 
by the right chords harmonize with the 
human vibrations before him. It is even 
claimed that true development is seldom 
reached until the student ascertains his right 
key, or at least, spiritual unfoldment is great- 
ly aided thereby, and thence by chanting in 
said musical key, before entering the silence 
of contemplation, some of the Sudras or invo- 
cations of occult devotion, such as : 

"O Divine Truth, the living Christ ! Abide 
in me, Thou in me and I in thee, O God ! " 

" Arise O my Soul ! Arise O my Soul ! 
In Truth and Light be free ! Out in the shin- 
ing mists of eternity, arise O my Soul ! " 

For those who are trying to measure the 
possibilities of healing through harmony, of 
treating the sick by both vocal and instru- 
mental music, the effect might be magical if 
the physical key-note of the patient could be 



4i 

ascertained, and some grand affirmations of 
truth were sung into the consciousness of the 
sufferer until his lowered tone were thus 
raised through responsive vibrations, to con- 
cert pitch, to a normal state of health. It is 
possible that the angels often try this method 
of reforming the wayward, uplifting the 
downcast and healing the sin-sick soul. 

But while the method referred to, of chant- 
ing some devout aspiration in one's own 
key, might assist in detaching the mind from 
the mundane plane of thought, and lend 
wings to growth, let none be discouraged if 
he lacks this aid, since the true gateway, the 
royal road to spiritual unfoldment is realiza- 
tion of spirit which awaits, invites us all. 

Then apart from this distinct musical key 
of our physical nature, there is the tempera- 
mental key that gives expression to the tone, 
the grave or gay, sad or merry, patient or 
hasty, features however that need not be 
copyrighted and unchangeable. They can 
be modulated, transformed, and the song of 



42 

life gain richness, strength and sweetness 
thereby, and this is one of the tasks set for 
the true master of spiritual harmony. 

Human types of character are nothing if 
not distinctly individual. It is as rare to find 
two natures alike as to find two blades of 
grass, or two leaves upon a tree of the same 
pattern. There are human roses and human 
thistles. In every social circle there are 
firm, sturdy growths, and clinging vines, fra- 
grant blossoms, and, alas ! poisonous thorns. 
Traces of both the vegetable and animal 
kingdom, which we have perhaps passed 
through in our upward climb, still cling to 
our garments, and should serve as a goad 
toward a still higher, more spiritual growth. 

For it is the divine key with which it 
should be our life endeavor to accord — the 
key-note of Love — of universal, supreme, 
impartial love, to neighbor, friend, or stranger 
alike. This tone, like a dominant note, like 
the clear peal of a bell, or golden cymbal, 
should ring through every thought and act 



43 

and word of life's symphony. How much of 
the discord, the differences which lead to 
quarreling, to spite, and even that dangerous 
attribute, hate — the seed-thought of all mur- 
der — comes of too close adherence to indi- 
vidual types, stickling for personal rights or 
opinions, in narrow, selfish assertiveness, 
instead of seeking eagerly, lovingly, for 
points of agreement with one's neighbor. 
For such harmony can always be found, 
since it is divine law. If we pound and 
jangle the wires of our musical instruments, 
they will not stay in tune. Keep to the pitch. 
Vibrate with harmony always, and then Love 
must find expression. 

If our nations would thus cease to empha- 
size their differences, and in amicable con- 
ference seek for points of agreement, then 
their formidable quarrels, their desires for 
unrighteous usurpation would not be decided 
by blood-shed and the sacrifice of many 
innocent, disinterested lives. And it is claim- 
ed that peace was preserved in Europe, that 



44 

for three years, two belligerent nations were 
held at bay by the vibratory thought waves 
of a company of holy men who, whether 
together or separated by long distances, 
retired into the silence at noon-day, and after 
inviting the harmonious action of long, deep 
breathing, concentrated the atmosphere of 
love, peace, and good will upon those rival 
courts. How great a matter a little fire kin- 
dleth, even so little a thing as the vibration 
caused by a breath and a thought. Let us 
see to it that no thought-waves of envy, 
malice, or jealousy from our minds, shall 
encourage conditions for the continuance of 
war upon earth. 

Why does a panic of fear so quickly 
spread through a crowd of people? One 
feels it, if blind to any cause therefor. The 
contagion of thought, we say, but what is 
the medium of that contagion? The eolian 
harp-strings of the air, the etheric waves 
which convey the vibrations charged with 
fear to our perception as quickly as they can 



45 

carry tone to the ear, or light to the eye. 
They strike the key-note of fear. How 
must we then change the atmosphere of every 
room we enter by the vibrations our varying 
thoughts convey, or emotions excite, an atmos- 
phere, too, not confined 'to that room, for like 
the pebble thrown into the pool, who can tell 
how far and wide its eddying circles may 
reach? We all create thought-currents with 
which other minds connect. Then think 
thoughts of love and sympathy while per- 
forming your daily duties, and the hard task 
of some weary laborer may thus grow lighter 
and easier. Create music in the hearts of 
others. Make all lives a song, since your 
brotherhood is universal. This is what a 
spiritual or mental treatment accomplishes. 
It raises the patient's vibration to a higher 
tone, helps him to strike true and clear his 
own key-note. 

It has been prophesied that ere long a 
musical cult will arise, for which modern 
students may not yet be ready, although its 



4 6 

principles have long been in practice in oc- 
cult lodges, and one woman in London has 
published a brief outline of her musical 
theories which she labels " The Secret of 
Happiness." It is somewhat complicated, a 
little fanciful, and to thoroughly portray it 
would require a paint-brush, a black-board, 
and a piano, but a br°f outline may be ver- 
bally suggested. 

Taking first the seven colors of the prism, 
or rainbow, in their order, from lowest to 
highest in vibration, we have red, orange, 
yellow, green, blue, amethyst and violet, or 
indigo. Place beneath these varied hues, 
the first seven notes of the musical scale, 
named from the first seven letters cf the 
alphabet — A, B, C, D, E, F, and G. This 
makes A red, B orange, C yellow, &c, and 
as in every scale, the common chord, or triad, 
is made by the first, third and fifth notes of 
the scale, so the first, third and fifth colors of 
the spectrum are the three primary colors, 
Red, Yellow and Blue, of which all other 



47 

tints and shades are combinations. They 
form the main triad of the rainbow scale. 

Now starting from the musical Key-note of 
A, this writer's theory makes the scale of 
A-minor the one representing our embodi- 
ment in matter, its corresponding color, Red, 
representing the life-blood of the body, this 
scale the least brilliant of any, of a character 
so restless and unsatisfying that the listening 
ear of the soul is never quite at rest until the 
harmon}^ modulates into a resultant major 
key, just as material life alone never can 
satisfy even the materialist. Intellectual and 
spiritual appetites yearn for their own suste- 
nance. But, building up this A-minor scale 
to its chord, the first note A, representing the 
man Adam, C, the next letter of the triad 
would then represent Eve, because growing 
out of Adam, as the woman was said alle- 
gorically, to have been made by taking a 
rib from Adam's side. Now starting from 
this note C, to make another scale, that of 
C-major, always noble and frank in tone, but 



4 8 

which still represents a natural or material 
life, a cheerier harmony than that of A-minor, 
as the womanly nature is of a finer grade 
than the masculine, but yet limited as to 
beauty and richness of its harmony and 
(according to our theory) emphasizing the 
natural or sexual love, a love that is always 
selfish and leads to bondage, one to another. 
And this scale (the only perfectly natural 
one on the keyboard) is the one to which 
the race is now attuned. Its triad, C, E, 
and G, if we match the notes to their 
corresponding colors, yellow, blue, violet, 
using with each its own symbolism (which 
differs somewhat from that to which we 
have been accustomed, but each teacher 
or student has perfect freedom to select his 
own), would yield the attributes of Love, 
Knowledge and Reverence. But it is the 
Love of the natural plane, is still a physical 
love, the Knowledge is that of the head, 
often used to oppress and enslave others, and 
the Reverence of the natural plane is 



49 

that felt by the mortal mind for theological 
creed, established authority, for title, money 
or fame. And so this very natural triad is 
found wanting, as the material life always is. 
Even the colors of textures once in vogue 
were crude and garish, intensely natural. 
There have been delicate chromatic combina- 
tions of shades devised in this modern age of 
electric lights and aesthetic taste. 

And so now the desire of this new apostle 
is expressed through the symbolism of rais- 
ing the pitch of human life a semi-tone 
higher, by ascending the chromatic scale 
from C to C-sharp. This would make of our 
tone color of C (the deep yellow) a paler 
tint in which would be blended the white of 
purity, indicating a more spiritual love. 
Constructing then our new scale from C-sharp, 
we find every note must be sharped for our 
spiritual triad, and to express the new life 
which mortals are to live. Every faculty 
must be raised to a higher rate of vibration, 
become spiritualized. Love must be purified 



5° 

from all things physical, Knowledge raised 
to a comprehension of spiritual truth and a 
merely human reverence transformed into 
a divine awe of the Source of all expres- 
sion. 

The theory claims correctly that every 
created being has his key-note and that his 
body is weak or strong, healthy or diseased, 
as his physical triad is major or minor, in 
tune or in discord. And the least touch of 
anger, hate, or sensuality brings discord into 
his chord, and so disease or deformity into 
his bod}-. The purest love and a life eman- 
ating therefrom keeps one at C-sharp pitch. 
We want every faculty spiritualized ; as 
Channing said, "to let the spiritual grow 
up through the common." We want passion 
converted into purest love ; tastes, desires and 
appetites purified ; aspirations quickened, 
strengthened, uplifted, until nothing but per- 
fect at-one-ment with the Father will satisfy 
the dominant soul. "As the hart panteth for 
the water brooks, so thirsteth my soul for 



5-i 

thee, O God." This should be our yearning 
voice, our song of life. 

The natural A holds 435 vibrations in a 
second, the A, one octave above, has 870, 
and every tone between, its relative pulse-beat 
of normal health. Now our theorist in London 
is clamoring for only a semi-tone's higher 
pitch. We want to raise our life-range 
another octave, to sing the old melodies in a 
higher, clearer key. On the physical plane, 
we should first of all strike the key-note of 
health. There is no good or reasonable 
excuse for discord here, no need of disease, 
or jangling mental vibrations which introduce 
sharps and accidentals into the pure, whole- 
some, natural key. What health Nature 
exhibits in her wild, untamed moods, what 
exuberance of growth in her forests while 
unpolluted by human artificiality ; also in the 
animal kingdom in its natural state. That 
top-most flower on the tree of evolution — 
man, reserves for himself the questionable 
distinction of illness, of physical inharmony< 



52 

He falls below the key, the right key, for 
he accords only with physical laws, attunes 
himself to material conditions. If contagion 
walks abroad in the land, he speedily catches 
the tune of that agitated vibration ; - if the 
weather suddenly changes to cold, or warm, 
or wet, he proceeds to have a chill, or influ- 
enza, or a collapse of his usual strength. He 
listens and responds to the wrong tuning- 
fork, his belief in physical potency is his 
weak point, the cause of all his woe. Let 
him vibrate to the consciousness of invincible 
strength, an unassailable poise, an emancipa- 
tion from fleshly conditions, and the key of 
perfect health will be struck and held with 
long, full tone of increasing volume, richness 
and purity. 

Then in the daily task, strike the tone of 
good cheer, however trying and uncongenial 
the toil. Rev. Mr. Gannett has written a 
beautiful paper on "Blessed be Drudgery," 
showing that many of the virtues such as 
fidelity, perseverance, patience can never be 



S3 

fully won without the experience of persist- 
ent, long-continued Drudgery. It is the pol- 
ishing-wheel for the diamond. Then bear 
it heroically, cheerily. Even a minor fugue 
can be glorified by the radiant soul of the 
performer into a full-toned anthem of praise ; 
the divine key of Love and Wisdom can be 
traced through every sad, pathetic strain. 
Never lose sight of that key. Copy it care- 
fully in your daily intercourse with your 
fellows. They may not yet have caught it, 
are waiting perhaps unconsciously for your 
lead. See that your tone is not lowered to 
their possibly untrained level. If they are 
cross, or quarrelsome, your smile and cheery 
word should be all the sweeter, stronger until 
they catch the same tune. 

" Be more cheerful ; do not worry ; 

There is time enough to do 
Every day the daily duties 

That your Father, sendeth you, 
And to find some little moments / 

For heart-music fresh and new." 



54 

Music is not simply a cadence of sweet 
sounds that greets one from without. Music 
is within the soul, where love has its kingdom, 
and its magical vibrations must be quickened 
outward from a source of harmony innately 
spiritual. Then let harmony in every expres- 
sion of life be maintained at any cost, if the 
desired goal is health of body, or of mind. 
For all life is cradled in her soul, and her 
divine vibrations are most essential to the 
growth of every human spirit. Then let 
Music's richest wealth pervade thy being. 
Reach out from thy weary body, oh earth- 
bound mortal, and become bathed in her deep 
forceful tide until the soul of Music speaks 
in and through your own. With a soul in 
perfect tune, sickness or prostration are im- 
possible. The octave of the human and the 
divine are in perfect accord. 

Harmony is not alone a soft and pleasant 
essence like the fragrance of a fragile flower, 
to be occasionally enjoyed. It is force, it is 
protection from all error, it is strength invin- 



55 

cible, life fortissimo, being one with the Soul 
of the universe. Eventually, the rich har- 
mony of music and the deep cadence of truth 
will blend as they furnish a baptism and a 
quickening for the waiting ones who aspire 
for wisdom. The sweet notes of human life 
will vibrate on the atmosphere in perfect 
harmony with that great vibratory Ocean 
which bears outward and upward in a rising 
scale, the music of ripened souls. 

Among the inspired teachings of Mrs. Cora 
L. V. Richmond are found these strong, prac- 
tical suggestions : " The state of the system is 
so much affected by the condition of the 
mind, that if mortals knew this, all sweet and 
harmonious things, all words, all thoughts 
would be guarded, and the expression or 
existence of a word of discord or antagonism 
would be as steadily and constantly guarded 
against as poison. Each individual would 
remember that the household is dependent 
upon the spiritual harmony of its members, 
and that society is made up in its health- 



56 

giving properties not by mere formal polite- 
ness, but by the good., feeling which consti- 
tutes the brotherhood of man. Anger, envy, 
pride, all these things that disqualify human 
beings for association with one another, are 
poisons in the mental atmosphere, vibrations 
a s real as color : you bear them with you in 
your auras and take them with you as a 
portion of your atmosphere. If you are 
angry, it is like a shaft of fire into the heart 
of your friend or foe. If you have pride, it 
is like a wall of adamant that surrounds you, 
preventing the approach of human sympathy. 
If you have envy, it is like a shiny serpent 
coiling itself at your feet, and giving forth its 
venom in tongues of slander and defamation. 
If you have any unseemly thoughts, they 
form absolutely gross atmospheres that sur- 
round you and make your social circle uncom- 
fortable by your presence. 

" On the other hand, the grace of manner, 
the kindly speech and word, the extension of 
the hand in token of the sympathy of the 



57 

heart, the adjustment of the mind to the 
needs and ways of others, the charity that 
recognizes the imperfections of others, but 
does not condemn them — these make up the 
spiritual atmosphere without which no food 
that you can eat, and no raiment that you can 
wear, and no habitation that you can occupy, 
will do you any good whatsoever. Season 
your food with spice of mirth, geniality and 
affection, and it does not matter what the 
viand may be, it is wholesome and conducive 
to health. Let it, on the other hand, be 
embittered or soured with discord and disso- 
nance, and it contains no property of nourish- 
ment, and humanity is starved to death." ■ 

All man can owe his fellow-man is to love 
him. It is "the giving that does not impov- 
erish. It increases by being diffused." The 
practice of loving is the fulfilling of the whole 
law. Then love everybody and taste the 
pure joy it will bring, because of the reflex 
wave of harmony it will ensure. "All of 
Truth is involved in Love. The purer the 






58 

love we have, the more of Truth we know." 
Victor Hugo wrote : " Love is the divine 
spark, a portion of the soul itself. It is 
a point of fire within us, which is immortal 
and infinite, which nothing can limit and 
nothing extinguish. Man is a reduced copy 
of God, a duodecimo of the gigantic folio, 
but nevertheless the same book." And 
Ingersoll finely said, "Love is the many- 
colored flame that makes the fireside of 
the heart — the perfect climate of the 
soul." 

Love is the one great law, the human 
centre of gravity, vibrating from the solar 
plexus, that gateway between the spiritual 
and natural man. It transforms the brute 
into the divine. That heart which is attuned 
to Love and hence which longs necessarily 
for spiritual light and divine illumination, 
must steadily, even though gradually in- 
crease its vibrations, until they transcend 
mortal consciousness, and then the ineffable 
melody of spirit life, that harmony which is 



59 



not of earth, sounding through and above 
all mundane discords, is already won. 



Of all the arts beneath the heaven 
That man has found, or God has given, 
None draws the soul so sweet away 
As Music's melting, mystic lay ; 
Slight emblem of the bliss above, 
It soothes the spirit all to love." 

James Hogg- 



III. 
The Score Life 



6i 



" All one's life is music, if one touches the notes 
rightly, and in time." 

" Music is the language spoken by angels." 

Longfellow. 



LIFE IS WHAT WE MAKE IT. 

The trouble, I think, with us all, 

Is the lack of a high conceit. 
If each man thought he was sent to this spot 

To make it a bit more sweet, 
How soon we could gladden the world, 

How easily right all wrong, 
If noboby shirked, and each one worked 

To help his fellows along. 
Cease wondering why you came, 

Stop looking for faults and flaws, 
Rise up to-day in your pride and say : 
"I am part of the First Great Cause ; 
However full the world, 

There is room for an honest man, 
It has need of me or I would not be, 

I am here to strengthen the plan." 

Ella Wheele?- Wilcox. 



III. 

When the musical composer from the 
travail of his teeming soul, gives birth to 
the grand oratorio, or symphony, he breaks 
up, or separates his glowing bouquet of tone- 
flowers into scattered bits of harmony, plac- 
ing a full rich blossom here, a bud or grace- 
ful tendril of tone there, all and each to be 
re-combined with charming grace and sweet- 
ness into that majestic creation which haunt- 
ed and entranced his soul. A multitude of 
musical staffs are necessary to produce the 
united grand effect. To one performer in 
his orchestra, airy semi-quavers and grace 
notes are given, to pick out on vibrant string, 
another musician receives only an occasional 
full sustained note, to swell, and rise and 
fall, as his own breath shall will. . Still 
another's part is to remain silent (as those 
mortals do whose service is to stand and 
wait) through long periods of rest, while 



6 4 :•'.> 

the lighter melodies reveal their sweeter 
delicacy, and thus lend the charm of con- 
trast and cumulative effect to the triumphant 
crescendo of the full-toned wave of Har- 
mony's flood-tide. The separate hits of this 
combined score would be quite uninteresting, 
even unmusical, if given alone. In union 
there is melody, as well as strength. 

This is typical of the solidarity of life, the 
absolute necessity of a universal love and 
brotherhood, to rightly comprehend and inter- 
pret the divine melodies in our song of life. 
Our symphony cannot be rendered alone, as 
a solitary tone. Human types of character 
should not be too rigidly individual. Sharp 
corners should be lopped off, here and there, 
to lend an easier modulation to the general 
harmony. The Infinite Conductor who 
wields His baton of beneficent Law, to the 
key-note of Love, over His human orchestra, 
entrusts only a small bit of His majestic score 
of life to each soul. The performer who 
would endeavor to play his part alone, would 



65 

not only make himself ridiculous thereby, 
but miss his important share in the grand 
effect, and become stranded on his self- 
created waves of discord. 

We should never lose sight of the inter- 
relation of souls, and keep actively in mind 
the duty each soul owes to every other soul, 
not as a compulsion, as a bondage to chafe 
under, but as a blessed union, without which 
its own life would be incomplete, lacking in 
its full rich vibration of Love's surpassing 
strain. More and more as we advance spirit- 
ually, as a higher growth is slowly won, 
do we realize our oneness with all life, nr>t 
one life left out, for only thus can we under- 
stand life, and keep our gaze, single and 
pure, fixed upon the Source and Goal of all 
life — the Primal, Eternal Harmony. 

What is life? Is it this mortal existence 
merely, this birth and death, infancy, youth, 
manhood, old age? Is it study and research, 
striving and grasping, failing and winning, 
outstripping our fellows in the race and being 



66 

outstripped in our turn? Is it short-lived joy, 
then tears, despair and all the pandemonium 
of emotion incident to the unfolding human 
nature? If this be life, then the crash and 
blare of a Wagner tempest, — a Dante's In- 
ferno in tone — would fitly comprise our ideal 
of Music. And even when this mortal life 
becomes far more than a tumultuous, discord- 
ant existence, when through long soul expe- 
rience the true spiritual life becomes mani- 
fest, when only human feet are tethered to 
earthly pathways, and the real consciousness 
has become linked and attuned to eternal 
realms, even then, this whole episode on 
earth, though it be the richest, grandest 
of human expressions, is but one brief note 
in the ascending scale of absolute Life. 
And we cannot, with this limited fragment of 
the score, which we are studying now and 
here, conceive what is its original and com- 
plete design, what is the scope and breadth 
and sweep for each soul of Eternity's grand 
diapason. 



6 7 

Strange indeed is it that minds are antag- 
onized by this pregnant thought, that mortals 
rebel at the suggestion of a plurality of exist- 
ences as the only possible path to the con- 
quest of life. The mighty truth which this 
law holds, its wide outlook on the problems 
of life, naturally chemicalizes all error inci- 
dent to one of more narrow range of vision. 
With advancement, every doubter must event- 
ually grow into acceptance of all truth, and 
to the discovery that this revealment will 
yet become a hope of the world, lead forcibly 
toward its redemption and higher wisdom. 

It is alone an overwhelming argument in 
favor of the verity of this philosophy that it 
has lived as a faith so long, and steadily 
grown toward a wider acceptance, in the 
Occident, as in the Orient. Kingdoms and 
dynasties have been born, waxed strong and 
reached their zenith, waned and fallen, even 
Messiahs and prophets have come to the 
world and again withdrawn, while this doc- 
trine has held its. prestige with unwavering 



68 

strength. Of only Truth is such vitality and 
longevity possible. Fallacies are short-lived 
and soon forgotten. 

" Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting, 
The soul that rises with us, our life's star, 
Hath had elsewhere its setting, 
And cometh from afar. " 

That wonderful, indefinable power which 
we call God, is a perpetual Creator, the 
Author of an unending Genesis, whose chap- 
ters are never completed, each day, each 
hour marking a new " In the beginning He 
created the heavens and the earth," a new 
heaven and a new earth, perpetually. Now, 
the finite soul, inheriting, or rather from its 
oneness with the Over Soul already possess- 
ing innately each divine attribute, is likewise 
by inalienable birthright, a perpetual creator. 
Shall it then be satisfied with one brief, spas- 
modic, imperfect attempt at creative expres- 
sion, rest content with one solitary conception 



6 9 

of its power, one puny illustration of its 
divine possibilities, as a partially developed 
man or woman ? Souls must taste all experi- 
ence to become god-like, must know all 
forms of life to comprehend life and divinity. 
How does the sculptor fashion the perfect 
statue? By first practicing in clay. He 
makes a hand, an arm, perhaps lingers days 
over a foot, models a mouth and chin, 
imperfect fragments all, but gradually ap- 
proaching his ideal, his varied experiments 
finally express that glorious form of beauty 
and grace which lured him on. There is 
no other way for us but to practice in the 
clay, and thus express our mastery over it. 
And then when the form has arisen from that 
of the dwarf or the savage, to master through 
its aid, and through the soul's added experi- 
ence, other ideals, other powers inherited 
from its divine Prototype, which so thrill and 
urge the soul toward a perfect unfoldment. 
For even a Mozart or a Beethoven, having 
reached their zenith of musical genius, might 



7o 

long to express another, as yet undeveloped 
side of their complex nature (which must be 
all-inclusive if divine) as a Raphael, or an 
Angelo. " We awake and iind ourselves 
upon a stair. There are stairs below us, 
many a one, which we seem to have ascend- 
ed, others await us that go up and out of 
sight." 

Not alone as the great solvent of human 
riddles does this truth most strongly appeal to 
us, although it does explain the miseries of 
life, the unacceptable rulings of a presum- 
ably Infinite Justice in mortal experiences as 
nothing else can, and without which one's 
belief in an All Wise Love is almost stranded 
and wrecked ; but far more than this, the 
supreme triumph of the soul (known in 
occult parlance as the Great Renunciation), 
is possible only through the flesh, and after 
repeated expressions therein. Only through 
the thick* veil of sorrow can human eyes at 
length become incapable of tears, which alone 
allows clearness of vision ; only through tast- 



ing the cup of earthly pleasure to its bitter 
dregs can its emptiness be discovered, the 
insufficiency of all human ideals ; only 
through having our unwise yearnings grant- 
ed, our imperative demands and selfish pray- 
ers answered, can we gain a perfect at-one- 
ment with the divine will and a complete re- 
nouncing of our own self choosing. Only 
thus is the dross of personal selfishness 
purged away, only by fire is the pure gold 
of the soul cleansed from alloy. 

Now do souls usually attain such victory 
in one passage from the cradle to the grave 
even if they start from the possible ripeness 
of former experiences, which have advanced 
them on the road, enabled them in a degree 
to transcend the personal and the human? 
The Christs and the Buddhas of the race have 
not been very plentiful examples of soul 
advancement. And then after such triumph 
has been won, when all past error has been 
spent, every debt paid, desire exhausted, the 
world overcome, and the divine image and 



72 

likeness perfectly reflected, when we have 
even died that others might live, are we even 
yet capable of the Great Renunciation? 
When, spent with the toil of many battles, 
although wearing the scars of the conqueror, 
when upon this restless mortal wheel of 
change and desire we no longer must go 
wearily round and round (its revolutions 
only prolonged by our blindness and igno- 
rance, which are so slowly transmuted into 
sight and wisdom) when at last we reach 
the portals of rest, and gain the joy that 
remaineth for him who has finished his 
course, completed the complicated score, 
when finally an endless season of fruition is 
offered us, with opportunities for still further 
advancement, a wonderful, undreamed-of 
unfoldment in more etherial realms than the 
mind of man can conceive, the privilege of 
sitting at the feet of the Great Ones and im- 
bibing their age-ripened wisdom, to assist at 
the birth of worlds as creators, manipulators 
of fire-mist and nebulae, to listen to the 



73 

anthem of the morning stars as they sing 
together along their mighty courses ; ah, 
shall we be found ready then to turn away 
from all that beauty, light and supernal bless- 
edness, because our hearts so yearn over the 
misery and need of mortals on the lower 
worlds that we cannot enter Paradise while 
one soul is left in darkness? Can we then 
gladly renounce that rest and peace we have 
perfectly won and turn away therefrom 
cheerily, triumphantly, and go forth through 
the universe on our self-appointed task, our 
long eons of ministration for the upliftment 
and salvation of human souls? 

Of course we engage in this altruistic 
work in a measure as arisen spirits in the 
spirit world, our resting-place between fleshly 
embodiments, but even returning spirits, as 
has been proven, have not outgrown selfish- 
ness, not always deceit, and many human 
traits, which shows the necessity of further 
opportunities for growth on this stage of 
action. Ruskin has written: "There is no 



74 

music in a rest, but there is the making of 
music in it." (There is advance in these 
interregnums between the active and unex- 
pressed states) . "In our whole life-melody, 
the music is broken off here and there, by 
'rests,' and we foolishly think we have come 
to the end of the tune. Not without design 
does God write the music of our lives. Be 
it ours to learn the tune and not be dismayed 
at the 'rests.' They are not to be omitted. 
If we look up, God Himself will beat the 
time for us. With the eye on him we shall 
strike the next note full and clear." Aye, 
even though to complete the harmony, there 
must come a Da Capo to the primal theme of 
birth. 

The state of the Mahatma, or the Master 
of spiritual harmony, must be won through 
long experience, the ripeness of the Avatar 
must be wrung from the flesh. Can we 
doubt that the Christ by his last life-path 
through Palestine, achieved for himself the 
crowning triumph of his long series of soul 



75 

expressions, as well as bringing to the world 
the light of truth, life and immortality? For 
he was not born for the first time as a 
Messiah ; he was the fruit of all conquests, 
of complete mastery over matter. And when 
he was at last lifted up to his sublime 
sacrifice, he must thereby draw all men 
toward his victorious height. 

We are a long distance, fellow travelers, 
from that glorious height, to-day, and we 
certainly cannot reach it in this one puny, 
limited expression which we call life. That 
is self-evident. How puerile, ignoble the 
thought, how restricted the childish gauge of 
time and sense. How little we comprehend 
the vast meaning of life, its full score, how 
limited is the human perspective, the mortal 
idea of perfect harmony ! And yet we can 
almost rejoice that we are so far from those 
heights that beckon us onward and upward, 
because of the great joy of progression, of 
growing towards them, the blessed privilege 
of aspiration. To taste, hour by hour, the 



76 

victory of overcoming, to feel human selfish- 
ness lessen, and the spirit of self-abnegation 
growing easier, becoming our daily, normal 
expression, to feel our hearts glow with 
increasing love toward all the world until 
we see only the good gleaming through 
every perverted nature, are blind to error, 
shortening its existence thereby ; this indeed 
is life. Do we not thus gain the meaning 
of the text : " God hath not eyes to behold 
iniquity " because Infinite Love is so su- 
preme. Even human love finds it hard 
sometimes to see any fault in those whom it 
fondly loves. 

Ah, how much there is to overcome, to 
transcend, to achieve, and we have entered 
on that path, the spiral path of progressive 
life. We shall not reach the goal in eighty 
or ninety years, but eternity is ours, its 
endless vistas and opportunities await us. 
And when we have advanced far enough to 
place our ears to Life's great graphophone 
and gain history's record of all our past soul 



77 

melodies, or the transcriptions in which we 
have shared, the future score still awaiting 
our performance, becomes more intelligent, 
more illumined with Life's full theme and 
purpose. This record of our past seems 
now a closed volume, but there are no closed 
volumes. All the expressions the soul has 
passed through, not yet recalled, are an 
eternal possession and supply us with a 
reserve force for present action which cannot 
be fully realized. That we are here to-day, 
proves that we did not finish our business the 
last time we passed this way, did not wholly 
perform our tasks, or, more probably, did not 
outgrow the desire for earthly pleasures, did 
not overcome our appetites, our love for that 
kind of music of which form is the theme. 
And so we have enchained ourselves to the 
plane of sensation. Desire is the mortal 
tuning-fork which sounds the key for 
human existence on the harp of the senses, 
but desire must be purified and transcended 
on the mortal plane. We cannot escape it 



78 

by leaving the body. Death can never bring 
us growth or realization of the life which is 
spirit, the only true life. It must be won 
here and now. It is possible to live on earth 
a life of pure spiritual consciousness. With- 
out it, we are a walking statue, mute, vibra- 
tionless, not contributing one note to the uni- 
versal harmony. 

Spirit is the only breath of life, the God 
principle within. It is the Light which light- 
eth every soul. Thou, O groping mortal, 
art that Light which thou seekest — the Light 
of God. Then live no more in darkness, 
but walk in the supernal light of spirit. 
Climb through its radiance, and sound every 
note of the ascending scale to an ideal man- 
hood, then to angelhood and god-hood. Live 
and reflect that light, be light to others who 
sit in the shadow of darkness. Be the sun 
to melt away their clouds of sorrow, of pov- 
erty or distress ; be the healing for all their 
diseases. 

Emerson deprecates a life that is like a 



79 

thunder shower, one moment revealing the 
distant horizon, the next too dark to see one's 
hand. There are in our mortal world of 
shades and contrasts such spasmodic lives, 
there are human meteors that flash across 
life's murky sky, leaving one clearly defined 
trail of light on watching eyes, ere they sink 
in darkness, or seek new paths beyond our 
ken. Then there are suns of first magni- 
tude, glowing with fiery brilliancy, at perpet- 
ual perihelion, without eclipse, luminous time- 
balls, whose rising and setting illumine our 
daily task ; there are fixed stars, steady and 
true in their lesser paths, breathing of peace 
and fidelity to doubting, skeptical mariners 
on life's ocean, and there are nebula? still 
awaiting their hour of birth, their period of 
evolution. 

We are all nebulous possibilities, floating 
not aimlessly, but in obedience to Law's 
mighty decree, awaiting our appointed course, 
when our fiery, chaotic hearts, becoming 
cooled by earth's cycling storms, shall grow 



8o 

into bright stars, and thus serve as heavenly 
guides to other cosmic sparks. But the soul 
that aspires to greatness must be great now, 
it must be fed and nourished to-day, by 
ceaseless, deathless aspiration, it must hold 
absolute purity as its unswerving standard, 
purity of heart, of mind and therefore of 
bod) T , purity of thought, emotion and desire. 
Thus is man lord of his destiny, thus is his 
free agency outwrought ; thus can he decide 
his future, as his past already decides his 
present existence, thus will he carve out for 
himself just the kind of life he desires, 
during his next occupancy of the flesh. 
And if pure in heart, he shall inevitably "see 
God," and manifest divinity, become the 
savior and redeemer of other souls who are 
one with his own, those who are slowly climb- 
ing some of the lower rounds in the long 
ladder that slopes Godward. 

" The soul which knoweth this itself 

It is not born. It doth not die. It sprang 



8i 



From none and it begetteth none. Unmade, 

Immortal, changeless, primal. I can break 

The body, but the soul I cannot harm. 

Whoso hath laid aside desire and fear, 

His senses mastered, and his spirit still, 

Sees in the quiet light of verity 

Eternal — safe — majestical — his soul. 

It is not to be known by knowledge, man 

Wotteth it not by wisdom ; learning vast 

Halts short of it ; only by soul itself 

Is soul perceived ; when the soul wills it so 

There shines no light save its own light, to show 

Itself unto inself. None compasseth 

Its joy who is not wholly ceased from sin, 

Who dwells not self-controlled, self-centred, calm, 

Lord of himself. It is not gotten else." 



83 



The following poem by Rev. S. B. Cal- 
throp, appeared in The Christian Register 
nearly twenty years ago, and lest the lesson 
of unselfish love and divine sacrifice which it 
so beautifully inculcates, the mighty truth 
which it so subtly, potently portrays shall be 
missed by the present generation, it is here 
reproduced. 



THE HEAVEN OF THE MOON. 

They err, who dare to think that sacrifice, 

Love 's essence, lives on Earth alone, and dies 

When Heaven is reached, as if the lower world 

Surpassed the Higher in its crowning grace. 

God's glory is to give Himself away. 

Great depths of space, where once His Spirit moved 

Alone, now sparkle with bright stars, — His love 

Transformed to flame ; are thick with worlds — His love 

Shaping itself to Air and Sea and Land, 

A Kingdom for His Sons, His Love made flesh, 

Life of His very Life ! . . . Since God is Love 



8 4 



His children, love-begotten, each and all 
Must type God's highest glory in themselves, 
And give themselves away ! All this I learned 
Summoned in dreams to Heaven of the Moon. 



As some Astronomer, in far-off orb, 

Seeing the Earth's light waning, might have said, 

" Poor little star ! its death comes on apace ! " 
And just then, Life began, the very goal, 
God's reason for the Earth ; so men have said 

'The Moon is a dead world, its seas have shrunk 
Within its bosom, as the mother's milk 
Shrivels in breast of age ! Its fair green fields, 
Its trees, its flowers, and what so e'er of life 
In beast or man, in tribe or nation, once 
Seemed grand or beauteous as the life of Earth. 
All, all are gone, the very air entombed 
Deep in the soundless rocks, and all is bare, 
Lifeless, and barren ! Yet, just then began 
The higher, heavenly life for all that dwelt 
On our Companion-star ! . . . All this I learned 
Summoned in dreams to Heaven of the Moon. 



The Moon, the child from Earth's first birth-pangs torn, 
Outran her mother in the starry race ; 



§5 

First knew the glory of awakening life 
Thrilling in all her veins, first felt the touch 
Of moss and lichen clinging to her breast, 
First waved with forests, and first felt the tread 
Of million, million footsteps, marching on 
Toward Life, and more and more abundant Life ; 
First heard the praises of the Eternal ring, 
First felt the touch of God's surrounding Love, 
First built a human heaven . . . All this I learned 
Summoned in dreams to Heaven of the Moon. 



And yet no Temple saw I, no great band 
Of loving worshipers, no City vast, 
Radiant in splendor. Only two I saw 
Sitting alone, with Evening all around. 
The sun was slowly sinking ; and the Earth, 
Vast as a giant's buckler, gleamed afar, 
Her seas and continents aglow with light. 
With fixed eyes, gazing on the Earth, they sat 
Silent, while all their being spake to me. 
Husband and wife they were. Never before 
Had I once dreamed of Union like this. 
Silent and deep in grand yet painful thought 
They sat ; yet, all the while, within her heart 
A thousand little waves of loving thought 



86 



Rose toward him, and a thousand answering waves 

Rose in his heart toward her. A billowy crest 

Of Thought sublime in him, arose in her 

Instantly, tinged with love — light that she gave, 

While ever through and under all, I saw 

One silent, vast, immeasurable Wave, 

On which their being floated ; and I knew 

That was the love Divine, whose shoreless sea 

Embosoms all the Worlds and Seas that are ! 

At last, in her I saw a storm arise 

Of joy, and love, and grief unspeakable, 

And then a fearful hush, as if the heart 

Of that great tempest reached her. Then he spoke: 



" Two souls, God-destined to become as one, 
Together on the lowest round of life 
Must start and climb together, round by round, 
That sacred Ladder whose top reaches Heaven, 
No tiniest germ forgotten as they climb. 
The Sacrament of life, the Bread of Heaven 
Is shared together with each poorest creature, 
Else is the Bread not eaten, and the Cup 
Of Blessing rests scarce tasted. Souls that lovi 
Ascend together through all forms of life. 
Now tiny insects, homing in the grass ; 



87 

Now butterflies that quiver in the sun, 
Now live the bird-life, loving in the air, 
Till, gaining power by use, their Spirits pass 
Upward to higher forms, through beast to man. 
First ignorant and low, with here and there, 
A glimpse, a touch, a dream of higher things, 
But yet ascending still, from death to death, 
Till glorious Manhood bursts upon their view. 
And they know Heaven ! How our bosoms swelled 
That glorious day, when first to our twin souls 
Came the amazing Memory of the past ! 



How strange and sweet it was to trace the road 
By which we mounted into life to see 
That each Life-stage had glory of its own, 
A beauty not another's ; that the nest 
We built together and the new-laid eggs, 
The patient brooding and the flight for food, 
The sweet maternal and paternal care 
Of our new fledglings — that all this was ours, 
Part of the mighty memories of the Past. 
Then, then we knew we summed up in ourselves 
Life of all creatures, and so learned to love 
Life as God loves it, not one life left out. 



But, oh, what struggles ere the goal was reached, 
The goal of our desires ! How martyrs died 
Our brothers with us, that our Truth might live ! 
What pangs we suffered, pangs that now shine fair, 
God's stars within our memories' holiest heaven ! 
What aspirations high ! What fellowship 
With hearts that loved the tidings that we told, 
For now we knew the final goal must be 
One glorious union of the All of Life 
Our beauteous World had borne, the Life Divine, 
One in all bosoms and God all in all ! 



Now it has come to pass. Not one thing failed 
Of all that God had promised. Love and Truth 
Reign here supreme. One song mounts up from all, 
An endless Heaven of Joy and Light and Life 
Is ever round us. We see, eye to eye, 
And each new day brings grace and beauty new, 
Some noble thought to share, some splendid task 
A thousand minds may join in ; while in all 
Rises to God the Heart-song that He loves. 
For ages we have lived thus, and have felt 
That mind could not contain of God and Heaven 
More than our minds were full of, could not dream 
Of aught beyond ; for all of God was ours. 



But now an Inspirstion, as we know 

Out of God's inmost Being to our own 

Has come, a flash of lightning, that reveals 

Vast depths concealed before, until we gaze 

Into the deep abysses of His Love, 

Trembling to think that we must plunge therein. 



We have been silent. Little need of speech, 
When thy soul sees the thought of mine, before 
It mounts up from the inmost depths. But now 
It is thy will, and therefore mine as thine, 
That now I tell in words the mighty thought, 
God-given, grand and terrible, that shakes 
The very rock on which our being stands. 



Day after day, we watch yon mighty Earth, 
The star which Heaven itself bound up with ours; 
We see the struggles of its countless lives, 
We feel the pangs they suffer, and we see 
How close God is to all those weary hearts, 
His healing touching their disease, His love 
Wreathing itself around their loneliness ; 
And yet they see not, feel not, for the lack 
Just of a Voice to tell them, of a Life 



9° 

Bone of their bone, flesh of their flesh, — a Life 
That sees as we see, and yet treads their soil, 
And bears their burdens with them. Then the thought 
Fell on us both like lightning, making clear 
All that was dark, and pointing to a path 
Concealed from Thought itself before, — a path 
Of Pain and Sacrifice unspeakable, 
Which yet we mean to tread. God has not been 
Our very life to us so long in vain. 
Now when His Voice hath called us in the Dark 
Forward we go and trust in Him again — 
Yea, though He slay us ! Now that Voice hath said 
; My children! ye have pitied my poor Earth 
E 'en with my Pity, and that Pity calls 
That ye yourselves — leaving this glorious Light, 
This Peace, this Heaven, that I in you have built. 
This glorious Commonwealth of heavenly lives, 
Where heart meets heart, soul answers unto soul, 
Descend into the murk, that blindness there 
And keeping only your unconscious selves, 
Take flesh, be born, and slowly grow to power 
To tell your message high — in earthly tones, 
Mingled with earthly ignorance, but yet 
Told — that my life may entrance gain at last 
To poor worn hearts that pine away for Me ! 
For this ye will agree to part, to plunge 



9 1 

Into the black gulf of Forgetfulness, 

Trusting alone to my unpromised Love, 

That after struggling ages passed alone, 

The glory of your mutual lives forgot, 

Only dim memories of how fair Love is 

Abiding with you, I may bid you both, 

In some far Heaven, to know yourselves again. 



Oh! when that Voice had passed, we almost felt 
That God Himself had asked too much of us ! 
Oh, anything but this ! Impossible ! 
We cannot give up all the memory 
Of our sweet Past together ! keep but that, 
And then we go forth joyful to our doom ! ' 
' But then we knew full well that half the price 
. Paid nothing, that to go or not to go 
Was in our power ; but not to go — and stay, 
And so, beloved, we go ; obey the Voice 
Obeyed in ages past 'mid grief and tears, 
Obeyed 'mid Life and Light and Joy, obeyed 
Lovingly ever, as we now obey. 

' Farewell, my heart ! soul of my soul, farewell ! 
Once more my very Being drinks in Thee, 
Once more thine eyes look upward into mine 



9 2 



Sweet invitation, and once more, once more 
The glory of thy Love is wrapped in mine ! 

; It is the end ! Thy will, O God, be done ! " 

So, in my dream, I saw them, hand in hand, 
Descend toward our poor Earth. The bliss behind 
Called after them in vain. With steady step, 
At last they reached the boundaries of that air 
Through which no star can shine with light undimmed. 
Ray undistorted . . . With one long embrace, 
That told of endless memories of past love, 
Of Separation's agony, of Faith 
That God, in some vast far-off time of His, 
Would make them one again, they sank to earth, 
Hovering awhile above a city's murk, 
Close to its ghastiiest misery. Then a cry 
Burst from her lips at last,- — a long low cry,, 
As if her Spirit went forth with the cry : 
: This, this is Death ! . . . Already I forget ! " 



IV. 

The Rhythm Action 



94 



"Rhythm constitutes, as it were, the life and soul 

of all music." 

H. Schutz. 

" Keep time. How sour sweet music is, 
When time is broke, and no proportion kept." 

Shakespeare. 

" Music is the fourth great want of our natures : 
first food, then raiment, then shelter, then music." 

Bovee. 



Music to the mind is as air to the body." 

Plato. 



" Truth is the music of Heaven." 



" I think sometimes could I only have music on 

my own terms, could I live in a great city and 

know where I could go "whenever I wished the 

ablution and inundation of musical waves, that were 

a bath and a medicine." 

Emerson. 



IV. 

"Music is the literature of the heart, it 
commences where words cease." It is that 
form of beauty — "that Beauty so ancient 
that Beauty ever new" — which enters the 
soul through the gateway of sound. 

How easy is it to disguise the simplest air 
by changing the duration of the notes which 
compose it, so that it is recognized with 
difficulty, because its symmetry is destroyed, 
its action disarranged, its rhythm broken. 
Rhythm is a most potent law. Often indefin- 
able as it is, how it runs through every 
expression of life. Even the writer of prose 
composition often finds a word of three 
syllables, instead of one of two, indispens- 
able to complete his sentence satisfactorily, 
although he is not writing a poem, wherein 
rhythm is as essential as rhyme, indeed 
more so, since the latter is dispensed with 



9 6 

in what is known as blank verse, but rhythm 
is always imperative. 

Nowhere is it more marked than in all of 
Nature's vocal expression. The hillside 
stream might perform its beneficent mission 
of bringing water to thirsty man or beast, 
without chattering forth its musical, rippling 
melody which charms the ear and heart 
alike, causing it-to leap for joy with recogni- 
tion of its delicate cadence, years after that 
vocal brook had been forgotten. Every 
waterfall has a voice, a language, a rhythm 
of its own, a musical scale of widest range, 
from the deep, thunderous boom of mighty 
Niagara to the airy, splashing play of moun- 
tain cascade, as it leaps from rock to rock, 
to break its descent with musical variation. 

This is a most noticeable feature of the 
marvellous falls in the Yosemite valley. 
Their tremendous leaps of half a mile down 
the sheer, granite walls, with all the wild 
glor}^ of that unwonted vision, the emerald 
sheen, the diamond spray broken into rain- 



97 

bows, the delicate shreds of lace frittered by 
the rocks and blown by the winds, into filmy 
threads, uniting the gorge's gaping chasms, 
the silvery banners of mist flung out here 
and there, to be pierced with weird effect 
by darting, descending white rockets, — all 
this beauty for the eye is eclipsed by the 
charm that greets the musical ear, which 
listens by the fading twilight to the suggested 
melody of the Undines, to the grand, rever- 
berating symphony which Nature weaves out 
of the tears from her flying clouds. As Dr. 
Alger has said " Man could subsist without 
pansies and mocking-birds and rainbows 
and stars, but what variety in Nature's 
beauty, vast — universal — exquisite." And 
the rhythmic motif of the Divine Composer 
is everywhere manifest. 

, More than this, Nature is never on exhibi- 
tion merely, it is perpetually in action, keyed 
to some grand purpose, and not slothful 
therein, as the apostle suggests, but "fervent 
in spirit, and serving the Lord," always 



9 8 

fulfilling the Infinite Plan, of which it is the 
embodiment and expression. And this is the 
lesson for man — action — service — advance, 
hurrying not nor resting not, but serving 
always the Infinite design in this human 
expression, the purpose of man's life, here 
and now. 

There are mortals who seem only to be giv- 
ing an exhibition of themselves, and very 
beautiful pictures they often present, the fairest 
unfoldment of Nature's charms (and some- 
times of Art), but the valiant workers who 
have grown old and gray in faithful service 
for God and man, with the goal they seek 
yet unattained, realize that there must come 
an hour of awakening, sooner or later, to 
every idle soul, an hour when the bride- 
groom of Truth shall come and go into the 
Feast of Wisdom and of Love and the door 
shall be shut on the foolish ones who have 
no oil in their lamps, no spiritual light, and 
must seek it sorrowing. 

If an appeal could reach the ears, or touch 



99 

the heart of any mortal pursuing such care- 
less existence, such pleasure-seeking lives, it 
should be a clarion tocsin note of challenge 
to awaken them from their lethargy, a sum- 
mons that would help them to live in earnest, 
to be less absorbed with things, with the 
desire to possess things (their ideals nar- 
rowed to the plane of material wealth and 
comfort), to discover the emptiness of a 
merely mortal life whose false treasures per- 
ish with the using, a charge that would spur 
them to the heights, urge them to be free, to 
come out and be separate, and live the clean 
healthy life of the spirit. Naught else at last 
suffices, and above all, these idlers on Life's 
stage should see the necessity, be seized with 
the fervent desire to work — work — act in 
the living present, strong "heart within and 
God o'er head." 

And for those loyal laborers in the spiritual 
vineyard, often spent with ceaseless effort, 
whose toil seems a weary, uncongenial round, 
like the task of Sisyphus rolling to the top of 

LofC. 



a hill the heavy stone which always falls 
back again, let them seek to find the true 
rhythm of life, the harmony of its action, 
and accord therewith. Let them gain their 
own true key-note and then remain in tune, 
be ensphered by the atmosphere of harmony 
until the soul of music pervades the entire 
being. For the soul is ever the dancing- 
master, the mortal only the shoe. Ennoble 
toil by discovering its true place and interval 
in the scale of life. One piece only of the 
voluminous score is entrusted to each per- 
former, which he alone can render, accu- 
rately and well, and the perfect effect of the 
entire symphony will be lacking without his 
part. All work can thus be idealized, can 
become harmonious if it is attuned to the 
rhythm of the Deific Breath, potent example 
of perpetual action, that Breath which sways 
the tree-tops, voices sweet echoes through 
the forests, and rules the tides, with rhythmic 
modulation of ebb and flow, in storm and 
calm alike. 



For this also is a part of Life's rhythm — 
its lights and shadows. Every life finds its 
minor keys eventually, its sobs and wails, its 
pains and its yearnings for a lighter, easier 
measure, with fewer accidentals, a less pro- 
nounced dissonance, its longings for the 
resultant tonic chord of Love. Yet suffering 
is the gateway of all birth. No life can 
escape it until human imperfection shall be 
outgrown through this prince of teachers. 
How shall it be met? With cowardly shrink- 
ing and timorous complaints, an endeavor to 
evade what is usually the offspring of our 
own mistakes, our own chickens coming 
home to roost, or shall we seek chiefly the 
lesson it can surely teach, meet it bravely, 
even hospitably, with welcoming arms — this 
angel of a higher birth. 

Can we not all look back on sorrows that 
are now happily past, with grateful, reverent 
hearts for their beneficent mission, the growth 
we wrenched therefrom, the clearer insight, 
the broad education they brought us? 



Though Christ was a Son, yet learned he 
wisdom and obedience by the things which 
he suffered. Moses in the wilderness, lifted 
upon the cross, the serpent, emblem of 
wisdom, and only the cross-bearer to-day, 
finds the pathway to Wisdom. But long 
delayed is his ascent to those heights of the 
soul, when the cross is evaded, or weakly, 
rebelliously borne. There is one way, only 
one, in which suffering, or the need of it, can 
be outgrown. There is a royal road to wis- 
dom and peace, but few there be that find it. 
In this age of practicalization of spiritual 
truth, we have already out-grown in a great 
measure all bodily suffering. In the past 
few years, we have transcended to a wonder- 
ful degree the physical plane, simply by dis- 
covering and exercising our innate spiritual 
possibilities to dominate material conditions, 
and by bringing ourselves in harmony with 
spiritual laws. It would seem quite laugh- 
able to many of us to be overtaken with 
mumps and fevers, chilblains or other ills 



103 

of the flesh from which mortals often suffer. 
Then, on a higher plane, will there not pos- 
sibly dawn ere long, a still fairer day when 
the personal will has become so perfectly 
merged in the Divine will, their rhythmic 
response so complete, that the action of the 
one is the choice of the other ; and attune- 
ment is gained with universal action. This 
is the royal road to the heights. Affliction 
must then lose its sting, loss or misfortune be 
unknown. Peace is thereby won. Our pres- 
ent sufferings should serve to drive us (where 
the magnet of love failed to draw us),- to 
this great and blessed consummation, or 
should remind us of such high privilege. 

There are disciples of a stricter school — 
who often proclaim that which is undoubted 
truth in an unpalatable way — who are per- 
haps right in their statements that all suffer- 
ing is in mortal mind, not that it is a fiction 
of the mind, by no means imaginary, but 
when the spiritual mind becomes illumined 
by the light of Truth, becomes one with the 



io 4 

Father in plan and purpose, then suffering 
can exist no more. But such disciple makes 
a mistake, it would seem, of not admitting 
the beneficent ministry of pain during the 
harmonizing process, which position is illogi- 
cal, unbiblical, for it is stated in Scripture, 
that even the Christ was perfected through 
suffering ; there is no other way for us. It 
has also been claimed that if we believe suf- 
fering is necessary for our purification, we 
by that means attract it into our lives. Yes, 
it may be so, if soul-yearning for such puri- 
fication becomes as it should, a masterful 
desire. 

But there are other ways of attracting it 
within our sphere, besides holding the belief 
in its benign ministry. The pessimistic out- 
look, the crossing bridges before you come 
to them, noting the blackness of clouds in the 
distance at the horizon, when overhead, as 
MacDonald has reminded us, they are 
scarcely gray ; habits of worry, which the 
old minister said on his death-bed had 



105 

caused him to suffer tortures over the things 
which had never happened. But the chief, 
primal cause of human woes is the promi- 
nence of the self, of personal choosing. 
This is the central germ of mental pain, 
the exaltation of the lower self-hood, the 
dominance of the personal will instead of 
harmonious attunement with the Divine will ; 
this must inevitably create suffering perpetu- 
ally. We mortals think if we could choose 
our way, and order the events of our life to 
our own liking, how happy we should be. 
It is the goal of earthly happiness we seek 
in our selfish aims, and when we are met, 
face to face, by one of God's more universal 
laws, made for the multitude more than the 
individual, we soon break, or bruise ourselves 
upon it. It is only by forgetting self, re- 
nouncing self, that peace is won, which is a 
far more abiding, precious possession than 
that uncertain, variable will-of-the-wisp which 
the world calls happiness. 

Growth is the true goal, not happiness, the 



unfoldment of every divine power and possi- 
bility within us, and spiritual heights are 
never gained but by the pathway of sorrow. 
The fairest flowers of the soul blossom on 
the stem of pain. For how can strength be 
born without first the struggle for the mas- 
tery, and omnipotence is our pattern and pro- 
totype? How can warm, tender sympathy 
for other's needs be felt until we have first 
been in direful need of sympathy ourselves, 
until we have been in all points tempted like 
as those unto whom a chastened heart alone 
can minister ; how can any true education be 
gained until it is educed, drawn forth from 
within, after bitter lessons have been learned 
by a soul once fettered and cumbered by 
mundane driftwood? We do not dream 
what brilliant diamonds we may yet become 
if strong and heroic enough to welcome the 
polishing-wheel. Then seek to understand 
the laws of being, bring your life into har- 
mony with those laws, whence further disci- 
pline, or education along that line, will be 



107 

unnecessary. Life is a vast workshop, and 
we are the half-finished products thereof. 
Society is composed of unfinished, incomplete 
personalities, who manifest different stages 
of burnishing, and who very slowly learn the 
lesson that there is no forgiveness of sin at 
Nature's tribunal. A broken law, a debasing 
impulse, exacts its penalty to the utmost far- 
thing. Then sow what you wish to reap. 
Gain from all adverse experience the lesson 
it came to teach, glean from it fortitude, 
endurance, spiritual mastery. For there 
comes a time when none of these things move 
us whatever befalls, when all suffering is 
outgrown, because the need of it is past, 
when divine harmony replaces all earthly 
discord. Dante gained the beatific vision 
only by his passage through hell. 

The same rhythm of expression in the life 
and growth of a soul which nature displays 
in her alternate day and night, summer and 
winter is found in the old problem of good 
and evil ; our radical friends here again 



io8 

affirming that "all is good, there is no evil." 
As well proclaim that all apples are ripe, 
there are no green ones. For evil is only the 
green apple slowly getting ripe. There are 
different stages of growth and some souls 
ripen very slowly. They are not then evil, 
in the sense of vicious, but merely imperfect, 
not yet grown to fruition ; and mistakes are 
often necessary as stepping-stones on which 
to climb to grander heights. 

If we want to acquire that most godlike 
of all virtues — patience, that pure edelweis 
of the soul, blossoming far up above the 
snow-line of mundane expression — it can 
only be laboriously won after we have 
yielded repeatedly to vexation, petulance, 
even anger, until trials unnumbered are 
rightly borne. If we desire to fulfill our 
strictest sense of supreme justice until it shall 
become a flaming fire within the soul, we will 
perhaps have to be goaded into learning this 
lesson by the remorse and sting of conscience 
occasioned by the wrong inflicted on some 



log 

brother, rendering him evil for evil instead 
of good for evil as we should do, even to our 
worst enemy, that is, if this particular green 
apple is approaching an advanced stage of 
growth. And those of us who have come 
onto this plane of expression, this embodi- 
ment, with the sense of righteous equity so 
strong within us from the first, that we recoil 
with horror and amazement from any exhibi- 
tion of injustice in another, and cannot 
understand the nature that could thus express 
itself, simply reveal how thoroughly this 
lesson was learned in the last term of Life's 
school, as it must be learned through hard 
experience sometime, as all knowledge is 
gained, and only thus. 

The Infinite Law back of all expression, 
that wondrous Voice which spoke the man- 
date " Let there be light," also ordained the 
darkness, or rather because of the revolution 
of planetary bodies around a luminous centre, 
throwing the reverse side of such globes into 
temporary eclipse, alternate light and dark- 



ness became a necessity. Darkness is also 
necessary for the maintenance of all life, 
human, animal or vegetable, for even a plant 
can be tortured to death by being kept awake, 
if placed under artificial light when twilight 
falls upon the earth. The day must die that 
life may be born anew. Does it then follow 
that evil is a beneficent feature of life ? Is it 
also divinely ordained, or permitted that man 
may know by contrast what Good Is, how 
beautiful, adorable it is? Does he need the 
blackness of the appalling shadow to drive 
him to the Light? It is true that we should 
never know the sensation of sweetness if we 
tasted only sugar. This necessary law of 
contrast must obtain also in the moral realm, 
the shadow is inevitable there, for in a sinless 
world, while conduct might be perfect, the 
moral element would be lacking. Even 
though evil is self-manufactured, the result 
of human ignorance and mistake, the persist- 
ence with which man stands with his back to 
the light, facing the shadow, it still occupies 



a valuable feature in the economy of his 
unfoldment. He would have no spiritual 
strength, no growth, no victory without this 
opposing force which we call evil. The 
brave are not those who have never known 
fear, but they who have' had their direful 
fears and have conquered them. It is he 
that overcometh who bears the new name 
and receives the crown of life, but how can 
he overcome that which he has no contact 
with? How win the laurels except in the 
blood-stamed trenches of Life's battle field, 
and how could there be conflict without a 
foe? How could we know the Good and 
seek the Good without its antithesis to arouse 
our intelligent choice, our resolve to choose 
this day whom we will serve? Man must 
work out his own salvation and gain the 
wisdom to which he aspires by hard experi- 
ence, must thus outgrow the error incident to 
immaturity. 

Purity is a very different quality from 
innocence and only won through a very deep 



knowledge of evil, after repeated conflict 
with evil in varied forms, until innocence is 
strangled and dead. It is not the innocent 
who are filled with all the fullness of God, 
who reflect the divine life in richest measure, 
but those who have become triumphant gladi- 
ators in the fierce arena of the world. The 
peace and reward of the eternal world must 
have known its Gethsemanes. In this light 
all is good, there is indeed no evil, only 
a helpful shadow to reveal the light. But 
there is no way for a growing apple to become 
a great, rosy-cheeked, juicy apple but by long 
days of preparation, during which it is hard 
and green and sour and bitter, though rep- 
resenting even then the best condition possible 
ere ripeness obtains, as does man in his sins. 
He will ripen into goodness eventually, and 
then with active, dominant virtue acquired, he 
will not need to seek further temptation to 
retain his virtue in a healthy state. He will 
be so filled with the Infinite Radiance himself, 
that his light will shine forth to illumine every 



"3 

path which his groping brother treads. He 
will serve as a ray of living sunshine. 

The law of cause and effect (another 
rhythmical expression of Divine Law) cannot 
be gauged by its seeming sway during one 
cycle of the sun. It cannot be limited by the 
pendulum of time, even though the clock of 
mortal existence should be wound up to run for 
a century. Like the two pillars of an arch, 
which figure has been used to symbolize 
man's free agency and God's sovereignty, 
their point of contact, or of union, is above 
the clouds, beyond mortal vision. This is 
the soul's eternal rhythm, its law of action, in 
alternate expression and withdrawal, action 
and rest, seed-sowing and harvest, or fruition. 
Ever the pendulum sways between the sub- 
jective and objective planes, between existence 
and life, or between life in the mortal and in 
the spiritual realms. It swings backward and 
forward, on through the centuries, the eons, 
the eternities which are but as a moment to 
the Infinite Cause of all life which we call 



H4 

Deity, perhaps only a second also to the 
aspiring, tireless soul. 

" O wondrous Life, vain, vain our best endeavor 
To pierce its secrets, we can only trust 
A care, a love encircles us forever, 
And we are safe, though dust returns to dust." 

Mrs. Browning has written : " Day by day, 
I weave my rhythmic thought," and this is 
the lesson fox each day of our earthly pil- 
grimage — to weave — to accomplish — to 
achieve. Action, strong, pure, forcible action 
should be (as is the rhythm of musical har- 
mony) the recurrence of accent, the pulsa- 
tion and soul that mark its individual ex- 
pression and character. Then strive to build 
up a noble character, live not carelessly, aim- 
lessly. Row valiantly against mundane cur- 
rents instead of drifting with the tide. Keep 
always the one aim in view, the attainment of 
the Di\ T ine image and likeness, for whose 
perfect reflection you will strongly carve and 
hew away at all material conditions, as the 



us 

sculptor strikes off the clay that eclipses his 
ideal of beauty. Put the best endeavor of 
your whole soul, each day, each hour, into 
everything you do. Only thus is progression 
possible. And this is eternal action — the 
rhythm of Divine Law. Seek for harmony 
always, maintain it at any cost. Make of life 
a full, rich melody. Let no discord enter 
the sacred precincts of your thoughts, and 
thus preserve your acts from jangling vibra- 
tions, so that in some distant realm of song, 
ye may one day rehearse the triumphant 
chorus that voices the victory of a human 
soul. 



" We are not here for holidays ■ — our lives are not 
for dreaming, 

While toiling hands and busy heads are laboring 
all around. 

Men are stirring, wheels are whirring, fires gleam- 
ing, vessels steaming, 

There is work on land and ocean and in regions 
underground ; 



And full often, as I ponder, o 'er some lofty pile 

upspringing, 
On triumphant deeds accomplished, on some mighty 

victory won, 
I find that in my ears a chime of thought has 

been set ringing, 
All great works are made up of little works well 

done." 



V. 

The Melody • • Progression 



" Melody is the very life-blood of music, 
Melody alone constitutes the essence of all music." 

Raff. 

" Friends should not only live in harmony but in 

melodv." ^, 

lhoreau. 



" The life that is in tune with the melodies of 
heaven cannot fail of being happy." 

/. H. Shorthouse. 

" Since ever the world was fashioned, 

Water and air and sod, 
A music of divers meaning 

Has flowed from the hand of God. 
In valley, and gorge and upland, 

On stormy mountain height, 
He makes him a harp of the forest, 

He sweeps the chords with might. 
• He puts forth his hand to the ocean. 

He speaks and the waters flow ; 
Now in a chorus of thunder, 

Now in a cadence low. 
He touches the waving flower bells, 

He plays on the woodland streams 



A tender song like a mother 

Sings to her child in dreams. 

But the music divinest and dearest, 
Since ever the years began, * 

Is the manifold passionate music 

He draws from the heart of man." 

Anon. 



" For educational purposes music is invaluable. It 
softens the young barbarian, it makes him use his 
ringers deftly, it lifts him up, it makes him receive 
messages from another world, it makes him feel the 
charm of melody and beauty. True it is, music gives 
us a new life, and to be without that life is the same loss 
as to be blind, and not to know the infinite blue of the 
sky, the varied verdure of the trees, or the silver sparkle 
of the sea. Music is the language of the soul but it 
defies interpretation. It means something, but that 
something belongs not to this world of sense and logic, 
but to another world quite real, though beyond all 

definiti0n '" Max Mutter. 



Auerbach has beautifully said that " Music 
washes from the soul the dust of every-day 
life." It surely lends wings to the soul to 
mount in consciousness to its own celestial 
realm, for which in homesickness k often 
yearns, when almost suffocated on the dry 
land of earth. Music's divine vibrations 
forcefully act and re-act upon the soul. Life 
in the upper realms pulsates with divine har- 
monies, and what would mortal existence be 
without this magic art? "Is it the evening 
breath of the life we have lost, or the morn- 
ing breath of the life to come? " 

The thoughts that ripen in. the human 
brain are garnered into word-sheaves by the 
voice or pen, but music is the only adequate 
language for voiceless emotion, for sentiment 
that no speech can ever interpret, for inspira- 
tion far beyond the silver-tongued utterance 



of any orator. It is pre-eminently the lan- 
guage of the unspeakable. Blessed speech, 
all-potent tongue ! We feel its blessedness, 
we reverence its sublimity, its power to uplift 
the serf to angelic stature, to put a dauntless 
courage into the soldier approaching battle, 
to cheer the saddened, redeem the tempted 
and erring, to elevate and refine its devotees, 
a force we sense when we cannot compre- 
hend it. Lulling the storms of passion, 
driving dull care away, sweetening with 
peace ineffable the carping toils of life ; ah, 
it is what music makes us feel, not simply 
what we hear, that brings us in kinship with 
the good, the noble, the eternal ; the rhythmic 
harmony of vibrations touches the soul, lifts 
our rate of consciousness to a higher attune- 
ment, because Music is the vital breath of 
the Central Soul enshrined in all life. 

How it differs from all other arts ! To use 
Wagner's comparison, " Music is to other arts 
what religion is to the church." The sculp- 
tor has to use the densest of material, and 



123 

laboriously copy his ideal. The painter still 
copies mundane scenes, his fidelity thereto 
gauging the world's acceptance of his work. 
The author, who perhaps rises nearer the 
springs of inspiration, is sadly fettered by 
the limitations of human language and finite 
comprehension. But the musician knows his 
listener has a heart to feel and yearn, a soul 
to respond whether his mind is tutored in the 
manual of harmony and thorough bass, or 
not. The intangible air is his invisible, vital 
material, and creation, not a faithful copy, 
his heavenly possibility and prerogative. A 
beautiful thought, rhythmically expressed in 
poetry, may stir the heart with harmonious 
vibrations and lift it above the ordinary dis- 
cords of life, but it must find entrance 
through the gateway of intellect, reason and 
judgment, when all these faculties are alert, 
but the reposeful, effortless absorption of 
inspiration's message is then impossible, 
which baptism the song without words can 
impart when King Intellect is temporarily 



124 

dethroned and the soul regains its kingdom. 
Just what that supernal message is which 
music breathes from the realm of spiritual 
harmony to the exiled spirit on earth, no 
human language can ever translate, since 
soul consciousness has no tongue but feeling, 
no speech for human ears, but the spirit 
remembers the language of its native home 
and it responds, throb for throb, to each 
pulse-beat of those forceful waves that sweep 
the lyre strings of Life's great Harp. What 
a beneficent treatment such feast must prove, 
inevitably raising the vibration of the listen- 
ing patient as surely, scientifically, more 
potently than the ministration we call meta- 
physical. Human organisms are distinctly 
musical instruments as are worlds and all 
moving existences. On the psychical or 
subjective plane, vibrations exactly register 
thought and emotion, and in the spiritual 
realm they are rendered palpable in form, 
color and tone. All affinities and antipathies 
are explicable in the light of the true theory 



I2 5 

of vibration. And if panics of fear can be 
conveyed through a crowd by the thought 
waves of the silent air, how much greater 
the power of transmitting pure and noble 
sentiment when those air currents have voice, 
and their melodious vibrations swell and thrill 
through every spiritual fibre of the being. 
We must keep time to the music. We are 
lifted on the crest of Harmony's wave. It is 
flood-tide in the soul. 

Our state of human unfoldment exhales a 
decided color as is well known to those of 
clairvoyant sight. In the world of spirit it is 
impossible for any one to keep up appear- 
ances on small moral capital. If thought 
and action are impure, the surrounding atmos- 
phere, even the garments which the spirit 
wears, will be dark and murky, while between 
that state and the shining radiance of those 
white robes worn by the purified soul, there 
are countless colors and tints all a vibratory 
expression on the plane of light, of spiritual 
growth, or lethargy. 



126 

Similarly, we are constantly creating our 
individual tone - vibrations and we might 
almost pity our guardian angels at times, if 
they have a good ear for music, that they are 
forced to listen to the jangle of discords and 
accidentals which our imperfect living 
creates. But with patient, long-suffering 
endeavor, with prompting and impression they 
faithfully strive to raise the life-pitch nearer 
that clear, full note struck by the tuning-fork 
of the soul. How gladly we would all wel- 
come the day when human beings who have 
lost the true tone of health, instead Of being 
drugged and carved and vivisected, might be 
tuned into physical harmony as is a flat-toned 
piano, and then be fed and nurtured by the 
vibrations of sweet sounds and delicate colors 
surrounding them, thus lifting their spiritual 
consciousness to normal tone. 

It may have been generally supposed that 
there was only a sentimental consanguinity 
between flowers and music, but scientific 
experiment in these latter days has discovered 



I2 7 

that the growth of flowers is actually affected 
by the throb of musical harmony, that if a 
certain gray fibrous matter is subjected to a 
long course of the sound of the note C it will 
change to blue ; and it has even been demon- 
strated that various plants will die if sub- 
jected to musical tones, while others thrive 
all the more in a musical atmosphere. The 
experiment is now being tried in Japan in the 
cultivation of orchids. These flowers are 
grown in enclosures where certain notes are 
constantly played. This gives the plants 
just that amount of vibration which they 
require for their full development, and which 
they do not receive from the sunlight. 

Vibration? It is the very breath of God, 
pulsing through all His universe. We be- 
come gods in miniature when we concentrate 
our vibrations in volition for noble action, 
when we breathe beneficent thought waves 
over our suffering brother. Prof. Dolbear 
says : " If we can prove that thought pro- 
duces the motion of one atom or molecule of 



128 

matter, as in the case of light and heat, then 
we have as scientific solution of the law of 
telepathy, or the transference of idea, as in 
the case of heat waves that flood the uni- 
verse." Then through this vibratory law, 
can we not understand how potent even men- 
tal treatment can become to relieve suffering 
and restore waning power, because it replaces 
the distinctive elements of mental and spirit- 
ual discords by the harmonious action of 
thought waves pulsing with love, trust and 
divine union. Choose what waves you will 
vibrate with, the major or the minor tones, 
and then decide to remain in tune. 

History writes its indelible records in the 
music of the various countries of the civil- 
ized world. Their inner life can perhaps 
best be revealed through their national songs, 
ballads and martial lyrics. Plato affirmed 
that " a change in the songs of musicians can 
change the state of commonwealths." What 
a varied language Music hath, as diverse as 
is the human soul ! The weird runes and 



I 2g 

quaint folk-songs of the Scandinavians are 
crisp and strong as the northern, pine-laden 
breezes which inspire them, while in tropical 
and almost barbaric contrast are the rollick- 
ing, dashing melodies of the Hungarians, 
their picturesque, pantomimic Czardas, and 
spirited national Rackoczy. A Gypsy band 
may not rank as classical musicians, or be 
strictly faithful to harmonic laws, but what 
warmth and color they exhibit, how rich and 
florid and whimsical, how sad and pathetic is 
the musical feast they provide. It were easy 
to state what these children of the sunshine 
and the forest play, but hoau their selections 
are rendered is beyond description only in 
the language of the soul (that soul perhaps, 
which thus gains echoes of a life of wild, 
semi-barbaric freedom, it once has known, 
and thus re-collects a leaf from an earlier 
spring in Life's long story). For Music, 
like speech, is untranslatable to alien ears, 
and this Hungarian harmony, or the paucity 
of it, its defiance of regular tempo or rules 



1 3 o 

of technique, creates an art which has been 
nurtured by experiences of life to which we 
are strangers. It is a breath of the Orient, 
which our colder clime and race can never 
reproduce. 

How inevitably the type of character, spir- 
itual or intellectual, allegro or adagio, is 
revealed in a composer's work. And in the 
realm of musical composition, man, even on 
this mortal plane, becomes "one with the 
Father," proves himself also a Creator, as. he 
gives birth to a new world of harmony out of 
silence, even as God out of darkness and 
void, spoke into action the primeval Light. 
Then chaos became cosmos, as now from a 
tangled jargon of vibrations, a wilderness of 
sound, beautiful harmony is born, and mere 
noise becomes intelligent melody, conveys a 
potent message to ear and heart alike, until 
thought is illumined and life is spiritualized. 
Tones are to feeling and emotion what words 
are to thoughts, their tangible expression, 
but " a song will outlive all sermons in the 



i3i 

memory." Music also always cheers, refines 
and uplifts, while words sometimes agitate 
and annoy. No one could quarrel through 
the agency of music, although musicians 
have been known to quarrel, but they then 
leave their art behind them, all the heavenly 
grace and blessedness of it and descend to 
brutal speech and agitated mental clashings, 
with selfishness as their theme. 

The first rule of Music as of Law, is 
Order. That divine orderly sequence which 
all natural growth exhibits, must rule in the 
courts of harmony, as it should always reign 
in the human heart. Some erudite thinkers 
have chosen to designate the Infinite Neu- 
menon, and all resultant phenomena, as 
Divine Order. The orderly person is always 
the harmonious person, and harmony leads 
toward divinity. But there is more than 
harmony in the outworkings of Infinite Law. 
Its voice is Melody. What else could inspire 
the gay carol of the birds, no two songs 
alike, or in, the same key, what else speaks 



132 

in the merry rippling laughter of the moun- 
tain brook, in the reverberation of the mighty 
artillery of the clouds, or the soft minor 
moaning of the wind among the rustling 
leaves. How greatly does Nature's music 
enhance her charms, how different the qual- 
ity of her song, how diverse the sentiment 
awakened by that weird, sad, restless mono- 
tone of the sea and the tinkling, chattering 
flow of rollicking waterfall, or between the 
sad, soughing pine, and the merry clap, clap 
of the poplar leaves ! What wide range of 
tone between that rapturous, sunny trill of 
the lark echoing through the leafy arches of 
the forest, which sweet refrain the listener 
holds his breath to catch, and that harsh 
prolonged buzz and whir of the August 
cricket, which often taxes the sensitive ear 
to the limit of endurance, and yet the 
cricket's high-keyed note is never heard 
save when the exuberance of the summer 
is at highest tide. Music is still the vibrant 
breath of all life. What stirs the tense 



»33 

strings of the seolian harp to melody where 
the winds are the only performers? Even 
silence is vocal with the rhythm of the Infi- 
nite thought. 

Can we believe that the music of the 
spheres, as the mighty planets move along 
their etheric courses, the vibrations of that 
creative scale to which suns and worlds are 
tones and semi-tones, bear no melody? Is it 
suggestive of octaves or chords merely, in 
harmonious attunement? Can we not readily 
conceive that some grand anthem of praise, 
or of aspiration, is sounded from that mighty 
key-board, some glorious diapason inconceiv- 
able to finite apprehension, but which can 
be comprehended and enjoyed by archangelic 
auditors? And can we not believe that the 
theme of this stellar oratorio is, must ever be 
— Progression, the innate melody of every 
world as of every soul? How else could the 
nascent nebulae become the teeming planet, 
bearing on its breast its wealth of vegetable, 
animal and human life ? How else would 



J 34 

the acorn become the giant oak,, the babe 
grow into the man, the criminal become the 
future Christ? Praise unspeakable to the 
All- Wise Giver of every blessing for this 
crowning possibility, this Law of necessary 
advance, this impetus of constant, persistent 
progression toward a higher ideal. This is 
our human birthright, however tardy we are 
to enter upon its possession. We cannot 
stand still. The Law forbids. Each new 
morrow must find us farther than to-day, 
farther on our course toward the goal that 
like a magnet draws us with strong, welcome 
potency. We may not realize marked ad- 
vance in the daily walk, but the cumulative 
harvest of the years must work out an exceed- 
ing weight of glory. To this end we must 
listen now to the inspiration of our own souls, 
catch the melody to which our lives should 
be attuned, that when some hour of grand 
performance comes, the full score be ready, 
and our part in its interpretation, even though 
it be but one minor chord, shall ring true and 



135 

clear, shall not be missing from the full-toned 
symphony. 

For on this mortal scale of life, we can 
approach attunement with the music of the 
spheres, with those mighty laws whose opera- 
tions on the stellar key-board, discharge a 
distinct melody ; we can accord with divine 
harmonies, with that universal action which 
links humanity with omnipotence, endows it 
with power to conquer pain, overcome error, 
heal the sick and give sight to the blind, lifts 
its consciousness to a knowledge and realiza- 
tion of the potencies of Spirit, the beauty and 
fragrance of the life which is Spirit, pure, 
absolute, emancipated spirit for embodied as 
well as disembodied spirits (since we shall 
not soon know complete freedom beyond the 
veil unless we have won it upon this plane of 
action) ; a growth in spirit, an ever-increas- 
ing, mightier grasp of all spiritual possibili- 
ties, an ever-progressive advance day after 
day, hour by hour, on — on toward that won- 
drous goal of all spiritual striving — con- 



1 36 

scious one-ness with the Great Spirit — the 
Source — the vibrating, rhythmic Breath of 
all Life, all Purity and Power. 

Then sing your Easter carols con sfortto, 
every day, your peans of resurrection from 
the grave of mortal birth, from this veil of 
Maya which eclipses the true vision of the 
soul. Lay in the grave of oblivion all taint 
of materiality, of ignoble conception, of 
limited ideal, and with the death of the old, 
gain the new birth of the spirit, of triumph 
over the weakness and bondage of the flesh, 
and thus gain clearer vision, deeper revela- 
tions and realizations of Truth, of an ideal 
which we love and proclaim, which we intend 
to live for, are willing to die for, pledging to 
it to-day and always, our unswerving fidelity, 
devotion and service, world without end. 
Sound the glad chorus of arisen Love, of uni- 
versal, unexcepting Love, without whose 
unfoldment every life is deformed. Sink your 
plummet deep into this wondrous sea of life, 
seek to fathom some of its mysteries, more 



137 

fully gauge its boundless possibilities ; skim 
not the rippling bubbles of frothy existence, 
but live in earnest, grandly live in deed and 
in truth, live in rhythmic response to the 
undulating harmony of divine currents. 

The Light within the soul is one with the 
Light ineffable to which it aspires, the key- 
note of its fervor is the same Love that feeds 
the Eternal Fire brooding over all other 
forms of life, its strength to endure, to per- 
form, is a quenchless stream from Omnipo- 
tence, its desire for Truth, for the revelation 
of Divine Wisdom, which is the only real 
sustenance of the soul, is enkindled from an 
exhaustless Omniscence ; ah, indeed is it one 
■with the Father, and thus it catches the 
divine tune, the melody of progressive unfold- 
ment, and cannot help but advance onward, 
ever on toward perfection, although the final 
double-bar can never be reached, since the 
finite cannot become the Infinite. 

O but the joy of growth, of feeling the 
thrill of response between Spirit and spirit, 



i 3 8 

of catching the matchless glow of the divine 
fervor within our own hearts, of knowing 
that we are daily, more and more transcend- 
ing the human, overcoming mortal frailties, 
approaching nearer the divine. Let this be 
the melody of mundane existence, our Song 
of Life, and not ours alone, but may we 
assist all other lives to become one grand 
sweet song, for we cannot ascend the scale 
of life alone ; we lift all souls in our environ- 
ment into accord with the high note we 
strike, the rapid vibrations our advance has 
stirred. The harmony we express must over- 
power many discords, because it is divine 
law. "God and one make a majority." 
And how blessed to become animated tuning- 
forks for the world, to raise the pitch of its 
inconsonance, to sing the old songs of exist- 
ence, of birth and seeming death, of trial 
and discipline, in a new key, a more com- 
plete universal harmony. 

Never lose the gladness of music from the 
heart, its potent message from the life. Hold 



>39 

firm to the concert pitch of the soul ; do not 
fall below it in your mortal expression. Your 
scale is wide enough for grandest, fullest 
effort. Listening ears await the majestic 
strain you will create, or will interpret as the 
score is transmitted, note by note, from the 
Master of all harmony, the Source of all 
vibration, hence of Life, Freedom and Health. 



On wings of harmony we rise, 

Wafted to gates of paradise ; 

Music the ether where we float 

Out from earth's discords, to remote 

And undiscovered melodies, 

To past supernal memories, 

Where life was pure and breath was tone i 

Th' enfranchised spirit seeks its own 

True Source, the soul's key-note above, 

The tonic chord — the Father's love. 



36£ tbe same Butbot: 

A Look Upward. 

215 pages, cloth $1-25 

To Bear Witness. 

180 pages, cloth 1.00 

Pilate's Query. 

275 pages, cloth 1.25 

paper 50 

Key-Notes for Daily Harmonies. 

375 pages, leatherette 50 

cloth, blue and gold 75 

The Round Trip from the Hub to the Golden Gate. 
193 pages, cloth 1.00 

Lorita, an Alaskan Maiden. 

171 pages, cloth i.co 

paper 50 

Souvenirs of Travel. 

89 pages, cloth 50 

paper 25 

Short Lessons in Theosophy. 

Leatherette 25 

Metaphysical Queries 15 

Is it Hypnotism ? 10 

What is Thought ? 10 

The New Renaissance 10 



AUG 1 6 1902 



1 13 



i 1902 



AUG. 16 1902 
•902 



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